Lto ultrium takes a terabyte barrier

This spring, the first LTO Ultrium-5 format tape drives and cartridges for them from several vendors have entered the market, including HP, which began shipping StorageWorks LTO-5 Ultrium 3280 drive. In accordance with the Linear Type Open tape technology development plan , the physical capacity of a single cartridge compared to the previous fourth generation LTO Ultrium increased by about half to one and a half terabytes by increasing the length of the tape (it became thinner) and more dense arrangement of tracks, and when using hardware compression it depends On the basis of the type of stored data, it can reach three terabytes. Up to 140 MB / s improved and the maximum speed of LTO Ultrium drives (with hardware compression - up to 280 MB / s), which means that for one hour you can record one terabyte of uncompressed data on a tape using one drive.

Today, LTO Ultrium is the only viable format for high-end tape drives (in low-end tape drives, this de facto standard is DAT, which was recently reported in Habré - habrahabr.ru/company/hp/blog/87864 ). If DAT streamers are primarily intended for backing up single entry-level servers or workstations, then the main scope of LTO Ultrium drives is robotic tape libraries, which are often connected to host systems via SAN storage based on Fiber Channel interface and provide storage consolidation and archive copies of data from multiple disk arrays and servers.

HP launches a line of tape libraries of various classes with LTO Ultrium drives, ranging from the rack-mount dual-unit StorageWorks MSL2024 model with two drives and 24 slots for cartridges to the Enterprise-level StorageWorks ESL library, which in its maximum configuration takes five cabinets and holds 44 drives and 3546 cartridges. For companies using HP StorageWorks tape libraries, switching to the fifth LTO Ultrium will not only increase the capacity of the cartridges, but also increase the backup speed, because in addition to the increased read / write performance on the tape, the StorageWorks LTO-5 Ultrium 3280 drive supports eight-gigabit Fiber Channel.
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In addition, this drive is also available in a modification with the SAS 6 Gbit / s interface, designed for direct connection to servers, for which from this year the second generation of SAS has become the de facto standard. This drive version comes with HP Data Protector backup software with a single server license.

According to IDC, last year, 390,000 fourth-generation LTO Ultrium drives were sold globally, with more than half of the supplies being from HP StorageWorks drives. According to the same IDC, at the end of last year, Ultrium accounted for 97.5% of sales of high-end tape drives (excluding mainframe drives using a special tape recording format).

New ribbon features

In addition to the increased capacity and speed LTO Ultrium-5 differs from the fourth generation LTO Ultrium feature Linear Tape File System (LTFS), which helps you quickly find the desired file among the recorded data on the cartridge. LTFS creates a special section at the beginning of the tape in which the XML index of the cartridge files is stored. When using LTFS, you can drag and drop files from and to the tape in the graphical user interface, and also open them with a double click of the mouse, i.e. You can work with tape in the same way as with flash drives and external hard drives.
Together with its LTO Ultrium-5 devices, HP provides a new Tape Assure utility to monitor drive and tape usage, backup status and performance, and this tool can monitor previously released LTO Ultrium-4 drives. In addition, HP's LTO Ultrium-5 drives use proprietary Data Rate Matching technology to dynamically adjust the tape rewind speed depending on the data transfer rate to the host, which improves performance and reduces wear on the read head and tape by eliminating re-positioning the head relative to the tape .

Perspectives

LTO Ultrium-5 drives can read and write LTO Ultrium-4 cartridges and are read-compatible with third-generation cartridge formats, so companies that already use HP StorageWorks tape libraries to store backup and backup copies of data cannot install only increase capacity and speed, but still work with old cartridges.
In April of this year, the LTO group announced the development of the next two generations of Ultrium (usually the change of generations of this format occurs at an interval of two to three years) - without taking into account the hardware compression, the seventh generation cartridges will hold 6.4 TB of data, and the sixth - 12.8 TB (previously approved the specification of the sixth Ultrium with a physical cartridge capacity of 3.2 TB). In addition, participants in LTO already in the sixth generation of the standard are going to increase the maximum compression ratio from 2: 1 to 2.5: 1 and in each new generation to increase the read / write speed by one and a half. These plans prove that, despite the widespread introduction of backup to hard drives using the D2D scheme, LTO Ultrium tape technology will be in demand in the next decade.