With the release of Oracle’s StorageTek LTO-5 tape drive, Oracle raised the bar again, becoming the first tape vendor to offer 150 petabytes of storage capacity (uncompressed) in a single tape library, when coupled with Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System.

StorageTek LTO-5 drives have the ability to write 1.5 TB of native data to one LTO-5 cartridge. The dramatic increase in capacity with StorageTek LTO-5 equates to an 89% improvement over StorageTek LTO-4 and a 275% enhancement over StorageTek LTO-3. LTO tape drives are the fastest in the midrange, and StorageTek LTO-5 drives stream data at over 140 MB/sec (uncompressed), while competitive technologies negotiate data at rates below 50 MB/s. With customers experiencing explosive data growth and shrinking backup windows, the LTO-5 throughput is ideal for midrange tape environments.

Tape technology remains a key part of an active tiered storage architecture.  Oracle’s tiered storage strategy, which includes tape, disk and flash technologies, lets you effectively manage and store data across every type of storage media, while significantly reducing your total cost of ownership (TCO).  Adding LTO-5 to StorageTek libraries, and Oracle’s tape technology provides even more capacity to ensure that tape technology retains a favorable TCO (and $$/GB) among other storage tiers.

This paper will discuss the advantages and industry-leading capacity of the StorageTek LTO-5 tape drive and how implementing StorageTek LTO-5 into StorageTek tape libraries will result in a significant boost in capacity that will help customers stay on top of their data growth needs.