old news:IBM ushers in LTO era
By Sonia R. Lelii, eWEEK
August 21, 2000 12:00 AM ET
The long wait for LTO drives is set to end this week as IBM unveils the first Linear Tape Open products. More significantly, the rollout signals the arrival of open standards in the tape drive industry.
IBM will cross the finish line ahead of LTO consortium partners Seagate Technology Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. with a product technol ogy that competes head-on with mid range market leader Quantum Corp.'s DLT (Digital Linear Tape), which is due this fall…..
….LTO Ultrium is designed to enhance tape performance and capacity to meet the needs of customers facing exploding data growth. LTO tape boasts a 200GB compressed capacity and 20M-bps to 40M-bps transfer rates, comparable to Quantum's Super DLT.
Generally, tape is a conservative medium. It's going to take at least a year before customers start to accept LTO as the standard, said Jim Garden, an analyst at Technology Business Research, in Hampton, N.H.
Xpedx, a digital imaging company that is a division of International Paper Co., has been beta testing IBM's new LTO products and has found bugs. But officials are still trying to figure out if the problems are in IBM's LTO firmware or with Veritas Software Corp.'s Backup Exec 8.5, scheduled for release by the end of the summer. "But there have been a lot less bugs than anticipated," said Scott Dunlap, a systems engineer at Xpedx, in Macedonia, Ohio. Snip<>
zdnet.com
Tale of the tape
TECHNOLOGY CAPACITY (COMPRESSED) TRANSFER RATE
LTO (Ultrium ) 200GB 20-40MB per second
LTO (Accelis ) 50GB 20-40MB per second
Super DLT 200GB 20MB per second
DLT-8000 72GB 10MB per second
AIT-21 30GB 15.6MB per second
(Advanced Intelligent Tape-2)
Source: LTO.org and Qualstar
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