LTO 8 is here!

On October 10^th IBM announced the next generation of LTO tape drives, LTO generation 8. The new tape drives are available in a variety of platforms, from the single half-height drive desktop system, to the enterprise class tape libraries; TS3500 and TS4500. All the platforms are planned to be available this year with different availability dates ranging from October through December. For details here is the link:  Details.  IBM provides a video from the development team discussing the new offering IBM LTO 8 and there is also an article in Forbes LTO 8.

The LTO 8 announcement represents a return to the good old days, when the LTO program was running on a two to 2 ½ year announcement cycle between generations. The new tape offering, will support a 12 TB tape cartridge, providing a very high capacity, scalable, resilient and secure storage media for backup and archive applications. Clearly, given the amount of data that is being created and stored today, organizations of all sizes must consider tape storage to deal with the massive quantities of data in a cost effective and energy efficient way.