Spectra Logic has announced availability of the ninth generation of LTO technology for its family of tape library solutions, including the Spectra TFinity ExaScale, T950, T950v, T680, T380, T200, T120, T50e and Spectra.

“The industry is seeing a resurgence of tape storage deployments by organisations with growing data repositories, even if they already have disk and cloud, because tape provides the greatest storage capacity at the lowest cost per terabyte with exceptional reliability,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior industry analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Tape technology, such as LTO-9, also offers unmatched air gap protection against ransomware, enabling organisations to protect their data offline and beyond the reach of malevolent threat actors.”

Spectra Logic-5

Full-height LTO-9 drives deliver uncompressed transfer speeds of up to 400MB/s

The new ninth generation of LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape technology is designed for even greater data storage density and speed, providing up to 18TB of native capacity per cartridge (up to 45TB with compression) surpassing the capacity of LTO-8 by 50%. Full-height LTO-9 drives deliver uncompressed transfer speeds of up to 400MB/s, almost two times faster than current hard disk drives. In addition, LTO-9 drives are backward compatible with LTO-8 tape media, allowing users to read/write LTO-8 media.

“Today’s news of LTO-9 tape availability confirms the extensibility of this popular open format that was developed more than 20 years ago,” said Nathan Thompson, CEO and founder of Spectra Logic. “With each generation, new features have been introduced, such as WORM, LTFS and hardware encryption. We recently made software updates for our installed base of thousands of LTO libraries to enable customers to add or upgrade to LTO-9. And, since we are the first to offer a tape library – the TFinity — that can store an astounding exabyte of native data with LTO-9 drives and media, we couldn’t be more excited about the long-term prospects of LTO tape technology for our customers.”