Imation will soon be making the industry’s first terabyte-plus raw capacity tape, in the LTO-5 format, with delivery in early 2010. However are tape formats drinking in the “last chance saloon”?
The Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium has three technology-providing members: HP, IBM and Quantum and these licensed manufacturers continue to supply tape media and build drives. External drive data recovery when performed on these tapes i also extremely tough.
The challenge with LTO (and most other tape technologies) is its limited ability to throttle performance. Users must carefully manage their environment to ensure that they stream their drives or else backup performance will decline dramatically. Backup software vendors have recognized physical tape’s limitations and have developed technologies to improve backup speeds; however, the result is a degradation in restore speed.
The best solution to this problem is to introduce disk as a backup target. Disk provides infinitely variable ingest speeds and will not suffer the shoe-shining penalties of tape.
In summary, LTO-5 shows the LTO consortium’s commitment to increase tape density and performance. The real world performance improvements experienced by end users transitioning to LTO-5 will vary widely. This has always been the case with tape technology, but the added streaming requirements of LTO-5 increases the challenge. However physical tape still has a place in many enterprises as a deep archival medium, easily stored offsite, inexpensive, with instantaneous recording and good reliability. In this respect LTO-5 is well suited for this role.
