2017 was a big year for the LTO Program, and 2018 will be even bigger! At the end of 2017 LTO Program announced the specifications for the latest generation of tape technology.

LTO-8 announced an expanded storage capacity of up to 30 TB of data, compressed. That?s double the compressed capacity of LTO-7!

The LTO Program also released an updated product roadmap, outlining the specifications of the technology up to 12 generations.

Finally, The LTO Program introduced a new feature to LTO-8 drives – the ability for an LTO-8 drive to write 9 TB of data on a brand new LTO-7 cartridge, versus the 6 TB as specified by the LTO-7 format. This new cartridge is called LTO-7 cartridge initialized as Type M media (LTO-7 Type M media).

LTO-7 Type M Media for LTO-8 Drives

What is it? LTO-7 Type M media is manufactured and logoed as LTO Ultrium 7 media, but is labelled with a barcode ending with ?M8? as the last two characters. It is initialized at a higher density, which allows 9 TB of native capacity or up to 22.5TB compressed (2.5:1).

Media can be purchased as pre-initialized or un-initialized LTO-7 Type M media. Un-initialized LTO-7 Type M media can be initialized by applying an ?M8? barcode label and writing data to the media in a tape library that supports un-initialized LTO-7 Type M media.

What does it do? LTO-7 Type M media allows an LTO-8 drive to write 9 TB of data on a brand new LTO-7 cartridge instead of the 6 TB specified by the LTO-7 format. LTO-7 Type M media will support existing LTO technology format features including data compression, encryption and partitioning enabling LTFS, but it will not be supported on WORM cartridges.

What?s the benefit to the consumer? For the same price as an LTO-7 cartridge, consumers will benefit from 50 percent more capacity by utilizing it as an LTO-7 Type M media. However, only LTO-8 drives will be capable of reading LTO-7 Type M media, if backwards compatibility is required with LTO-9 drives, then LTO-8 media should be the preferred choice.

Gartner forecasts that worldwide IT spending will increase 4.3 percent in 2018. Here, LTO-7 Type M media for LTO-8 drives can offer data storage professionals the biggest bang for their buck! We think this is great news!

Data growth is on an upward trend and is not expected to decelerate anytime soon. Protecting data will continue to be a top priority in 2018, particularly after the series of high-profile cyber-attacks that occurred in 2017.

LTO-7 Type M media will address these new storage demands by offering a higher capacity and more cost-efficient means to store data securely using LTO technology.

An Updated Storage Solution for New Storage Demands

Data growth is on an upward trend and is not expected to decelerate anytime soon. Protecting data will continue to be a top priority in 2018, particularly after the series of high-profile cyber-attacks that occurred in 2017. LTO-7 Type M media will address these new storage demands by offering a higher capacity and more cost-efficient means to store data securely using LTO technology.