Store more data at a lower TCO than disk with LTO-7 tape

I’m a huge college basketball fan. I look forward to March Madness like some people look forward to Christmas. To prepare for the championship game or even the first non-conference game, teams spend hours reviewing video of their opponents as well as their own performance on the court and in practice. As a storage engineer, I always think about how much storage is required to maintain those video archives and how expensive it must be. As with corporate IT departments, college basketball programs need to find a cost effective solution to meet their growing data archive needs.  

 Last week,  Dell launched LTO-7 tape drives across the PowerVault tape portfolio. LTO-7 is the latest tape drive generation from the LTO Consortium and offers significant improvements over previous generations. With a native capacity of 6TB and a native data rate of 300 MB/s, customers can store more data faster at a lower TCO than disk.

LTO-7 tape drives continue to offer features to meet the challenges of a changing IT environment. A hardware compression engine provides increased capacity. Write Once, Read Many media support and AES-256 hardware encryption are key to meeting regulatory compliance requirements. Linear Tape File System (LTFS) support presents tape to the file system like disk and allows for easy interchange of data with no tape backup software compatibility issues. LTFS also makes tape storage tier integration easier as standard file system commands can be utilized.  

LTO tape offers the lowest TCO compared to other storage technologies. Tape media stored for archival purposes requires no power consumption until data access is required. Tape media can easily be moved to different locations for long term archive and/or disaster recovery. Tape is also more reliable than disk with at least a 10X improvement in bit error rate. Error checking is automatically performed with every write so errors that do occur are addressed immediately. With a shelf life of 30 years, tape provides a low cost reliable backup and archive solution.     

College sports are not the only customer vertical facing increasing data archive challenges. As the legal landscape changes, healthcare providers may be expected to keep records beyond the lifetime of the patient. Advances in geophysical data analysis allow energy companies to locate oil and gas reserves in old survey data. For customers facing these challenges, keeping data on primary storage is not cost effective. A well thought out data archive solution involving tape is the most economical.           

Dell PowerVault tape portfolio

Here’s a great video on the LTO-7 drive launch and the benefits of tape for your data protection solution.

LTO tape drives are offered internal to PowerEdge 12th and 13th generation tower servers, as an external standalone drive, and in the 114X rack mount chassis. The TL1000 tape autoloader is ideal for customers needing automation capabilities at a low cost. The TL1000 consists of one LTO drive, a 9 slot magazine, and optional cleaning and mail slots. Perfect for SMB customers and branch offices, the TL2000 tape library supports 1 or 2 LTO tape drives and 24 cartridge slots. For customers with larger capacity requirements, the TL4000 supports 1 to 4 LTO tape drives and 48 cartridge slots. As customer backup and archive needs grow, the ML6000 tape library can expand to meet those needs. Scalable from 5U to 41U, 1 to 18 LTO tape drives, and 41 to 409 slots, customers can store up to 2.454 PB under a single library management interface.

Please visit our website or contact a Dell sales representative to learn more about LTO-7 and the PowerVault tape portfolio.  

About the Author: Libby McTeer