Today’s enormous growth in data is being fueled by business continuity requirements, regulatory compliance, and information lifecycle management initiatives. Whether your business uses high-performance blade, rack-mount, or tower System x® systems, archiving and retrieving data in a fast, dependable and consistent manner is mission critical to your business. The Half High LTO Gen 6 SAS Tape Drive is the sixth generation and highest capacity Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium tape drive introduced to address the storage challenges faced by today’s IT organizations.

Greater capacity and speed

The sixth generation of LTO tape drives offers almost twice the capacity and significantly faster throughput than the preceding Ultrium LTO 5 generation of drives. This becomes the ideal storage solution for businesses requiring backup or low-cost, real-time archival of their data within a small window of time. With 2:1 compression, the new LTO 6 drive has a storage capacity of up to 6.25 TB. Along with higher capacity, the performance of this next-generation tape drive is faster than previous releases of half-high LTO drives achieving a native data transfer rate of up to 200 MBps.

capacity of up to 6.25 TB. Along with higher capacity, the performance of this next-generation tape drive is faster than previous releases of half-high LTO drives achieving a native data transfer rate of up to 200 MBps.

To further increase performance, Digital Speed Matching (DSM) will adjust the drive’s native data rate to better match the data rate of the server. This feature, along with a 1 GB buffer, will improve data throughput and reduce tape repositions and wear for times when the host data rate is less than optimal.

Securing your data

Businesses are proactively focusing on securing sensitive customer and business data. With increasing regulatory and compliance requirements, the need to secure data for audit and compliance purposes has become critical. LTO Generation 6 tape drives utilize AES256 encryption and support write once, read many (WORM) cartridges to help protect your data.
Investment protection

Investment protection

Compatibility with Ultrium LTO 5 and LTO 4 tape drives (exclud-ing encryption) and media eases the introduction of these high-performance tape drives into your environment and protects your prior investments in media. LTO 6 is backward read- and-write compatible with LTO 5 media and read-compatible with LTO 4 media. However by using LTO 6 media, which provides higher capacity of Ultrium 5 media, you will shorten read/write times, reduce the number of tapes required, and improve the backup window.

Greater data protection with reliability and serviceability

With a focus on overall reliability, HH LTO 6 utilizes advanced independent tape loader and threader motors. This, combined with positive pin-retention improvements, increases tape- handling reliability while loading tapes, recovering tapes, and extracting tapes after a sudden power down. In addition, the Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML) channel includes an adaptive-channel calibration feature. This feature enables the drive to compensate for variations in the media, recording func-tion, and read/write head to optimize interchangeability between LTO drives from other vendors.

For enhanced serviceability, it also captures error information. These errors are stored in the drive’s flash memory so that it can be recalled when needed to minimize troubleshooting time.