3 Key Differences in the newest LTO Tape Technology
Developed by the LTO consortium, LTFS is a standard for formatting tape media that ensures readability by any system. This new technology has expanded opportunities for accessible deep level data storage at a low cost when compared to disk-based alternatives.
The latest generation of LTO tapes, LTO5 can be formatted with LTFS to ensure a file-system-like view of data for end users. To better understand what this means for companies looking for long-term data archive systems, let’s explore a new product recently deployed in the market. StrongBox was introduced by Crossroads Systems several months ago as a game-changing alternative to traditional archive solutions. Presented by the company as a Tier 3 data archive solution, StrongBox utilizes LTO5 LTFS to essentially remedy all the negative aspects of tape, while keeping costs low.
All of this means that tape doesn’t have to be locked-down and out of reach. In fact, now more than ever, tape shows itself as a workable media for data archiving. LTO5 LTFS-enabled tapes have increasing advantages of previous versions including: 1.5TB native capacity, 140Mbps transfer rate and data partitioning.
Since it’s inception in the late 1990s LTO tape has enabled sharing of data across systems, fostering open standards and backup data reads. The newest version of Linear Tape Open, LTO 5, incorporates LTFS (Linear Tape File System) technology to bring file-system, non-proprietary attributes to all tape media. Here are three key things to know about LTO 5/LTFS:
- Increased capacity. LTO 5 doubled the storage capacity of the previous LTO 4 generation. With 1.5TB of native capacity, LTO 5 cartridges can scale up to 3TB with 2:1 compression.
- Data partitioning. LTO 5 includes a partition feature that allows tape to be split into two separately writable areas. Partition 0 holds an index of the content, and partition 1 contains the actual content. This LTO 5 feature is required by LTFS.
- Increased Data transfer. LTO 5 increases transfer speed to 140MB/s to optimize data read and write efficiencies.
Utilizing LTO 5 and LTFS, a new system called StrongBox has been introduced as a non-proprietary answer to industry needs for archiving unstructured data. According to a recent article from the Clipper Group, this product comes form an Austin-based company and uses LTO 5 LTFS to provide a portable data vault with rapid access to archived information.
Crossroads StrongBox is designed to address the need for a low cost and highly reliable LTO, presenting itself as traditional network-attached storage-NAS while leveraging the new LTO 5 LTFS.
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