LTO-4 Is Around the Corner, Should You Be Concerned?

The LTO Program today announced the availability of licenses for the next generation Ultrium format, the LTO Ultrium format generation 4 (LTO-4), specifications. The three technology provider companies (TPCs) for the LTO Program -- HP, IBM and Quantum -- are expected to introduce LTO-4 based products into the market, with their respective channel partners (which include other major system vendors such as Dell and Sun), about four to six months from now.

As indicated by LTO’s multi-generation road map, LTO-4 features 800 GB per cartridge native capacity and 120 MB/s maximum native data transfer rate, with native encryption and WORM support. Also as with previous generations, the LTO-4 drives will be write/read compatible with LTO-3 cartridges, and read compatible with LTO-2 cartridges.

Is this announcement significant to IT customers today? That depends.

• Definitively - for customers that still have not standardized on LTO in their storage environments. Market trends have clearly shown a rapid industry adoption of the LTO format. While standardizing on LTO today can lead to competitive advantage, not standardizing on LTO may prove a serious disadvantage, with respect to the many peers/competitors who are benefiting from adopting this technology. For those customers who have been considering switching to LTO but not sure when and how, start planning now for LTO-4 deployments can enable these customers to fully regain their IT competitiveness in data protection operations half a year down the road.
• Probably - for customers who are considering encrypting their tapes.Despite the practical need and effectiveness of tape encryption, significant customer demands (though arguably the significance is in interests and discussions rather than purchasing demands) have resulted in LTO-4’s native, hardware support for AES 256-bit encryption (AES, a.k.a. Rijndael, is a common scheme and quite secure at 256 bits for the key). These customers should explore their software or solution vendors to see if and how they are going to take advantages of this new feature, and architect the most cohesive and effective data encryption solutions and key management processes for their unique business requirements.  LTO tape drive encryption can offer drive hardware compression and encryption for maximum cartridge utilization and backup performance.
• Maybe - for customers who have already standardized on the LTO format but may need additional capacity and/or performance. Upgrade to LTO-4 upon the next regular upgrade cycle. Enjoy the operational simplicity brought by a wise long-term technology decision. Business almost as usual for these customers, except to figure out how to fully utilize the LTO-4’s doubled capacity and multiple-fold increase in overall performance (with compressible data), over LTO-3, to their own advantage. 

Comments

[dell lto2]

Dell LTO-4 backup tape products provide exceptional performance and data security tools to speed up regulatory compliance, routine backups of data center and business continuance. The reliable features of Dell LTO4 tape 341-4647 include 120Mb/s (native speed), 800GB of native space for recording data and data encryption mechanism.

[lto4]

Hi,

Thanks for the information ..!

Regards,
tape4backup.com
LTO4
AT4B3

[Lto 4 Tape]

Some of the popular LTO Ultrium tapes are: The 183906 and 26592 LTO-4 tape.

[ultrium]

Thanks all information are true.
Tape4Backup.com

[lto ultrium]

LTO 4 is a new technology and i think it's very fast.