It is now February 2 -- Groundhog Day -- and LTO-6 has not been officially announced. The most recent press release on the lto.org website is from August 24. What is the proposed media type, what is the density, and how will that compare with enterprise tape from the two enterprise vendors, Oracle and IBM? At least today, the LTO hard error rate is two orders of magnitude less than enterprise tape at 10E17 bits vs. 10E19 for enterprise tape. For those sites that have large amounts of LTO tape, I believe it is time to consider looking at the enterprise alternatives. Both have greater density than LTO, both are faster read and write than LTO, and both are considered more durable than LTO. Of course, everyone will say the price for LTO is lower. I encourage everyone to look at not just the tape and tape drive prices, but also the cost of the library and the bandwidth comparison, looking at:
Everyone will need to run the numbers for themselves to see the cost differences, but I think you will see some surprising results with very large storage configurations. Of course, the larger the configuration, the more data moved and therefore the higher probability that you hit the hard error rate with LTO. Time for a second look at enterprise tape.
Labels: LTO-5,LTO,tape storage,tape drives,tape
posted by: Henry Newman