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Oracle Entering Finally Into LTO-5

With new drives and library with up to 100,000 slots

This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on July 27, 2010 at 3:21 pm
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Oracle Corp. announced enhancements to its StorageTek tape libraries and drives.

New features of the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System include an increase in scalable capacity from 70,000 to 100,000 tape slots and redundant electronics to help customers manage growth, increase availability and reduce risk.

Oracle’s StorageTek LTO-5 tape drives, with 1.5 terabytes of native capacity, are now available, and supported, on StorageTek tape libraries.

The StorageTek LTO-5 drive coupled with the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System makes Oracle the first enterprise tape automation vendor to offer up to 150 petabytes of native storage capacity managed in a single tape library – more than a 100 percent increase in total system capacity.

As part of Oracle’s commitment to deliver complete, open and integrated systems, the StorageTek tape product line is engineered and supported with Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Exadata V2, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle Applications, and Oracle’s Sun Servers, as well as by leading third-party mainframe and open systems products.

The StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System offers:

  • Industry-leading scalability: Ten StorageTek SL8500 Modular Tape libraries can be linked and managed as one massively-scalable 100,000 slot library, reducing complexity while boosting capacity to five times that of other enterprise tape libraries.
  • Reliability: The only tape library with non-disruptive hot-swappable robotics that also provides redundant electronics and hot-swappable library control cards. These new features maximize availability by providing automatic failover capabilities that are transparent to host applications.
  • Simplified management: The Storage Tek SL8500 Modular Tape Library System enables superior tape consolidation across multiple, heterogeneous system environments with on-line service and upgrades and per-slot mixing of media so storage administrators can spend more time addressing business critical issues and less time managing islands of storage.
  • Cost savings: The improved scalability and enterprise-wide consolidation capabilities of the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Tape Library System helps reduce acquisition, maintenance and administrative costs since a single library supports mainframe, open systems and technical computing environments.

The StorageTek LTO-5 tape drive provides:

  • High capacity: 1.5 terabytes of native capacity and a throughput of 140 megabytes per second, uncompressed, a 90 percent increase in capacity over LTO-4 drives and a 16 percent improvement in overall performance.
  • Energy efficiency: Significantly reduced energy costs from LTO-4, consuming 48 percent less power when idle.

StorageTek tape libraries and drives are part of a complete data management solution, which includes data protection with Oracle Secure Backup and Oracle Recovery Manager 11g. Oracle Recovery Manager 11g’s support of the StorageTek tape and library families ensures superior data protection capabilities for Oracle Exadata V2 and other mission-critical database environments.

The StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System and StorageTek LTO-5 tape drives combine with Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager and multiple tiers of Oracle storage to simplify storage operations and reduce the overall cost of storage by up to 70 percent when compared to a single tier of performance-optimized disk.

The StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System and StorageTek LTO-5 tape drives are the latest additions to Oracle’s complete portfolio of software and hardware products, designed to enable customers to start small and grow into next-generation cloud computing infrastructures.

"Over the past 40 years, Oracle StorageTek tape and library solutions have incorporated innovative technology to improve scalability, performance and reliability while continuing to lower the total cost of ownership," said Jim Cates, vice president, Tape Development, Oracle. "With today’s announcement, large tape users now have the capacity to accommodate the explosion of data in their organizations. Only Oracle’s StorageTek enterprise tape solutions enable customers to easily scale capacity to upwards of 150 petabytes in one, easy to manage storage system – while systems remain up-and-running."

Comments

This announcement confirms that Larry Ellison has decided to pursue the tape activity of Sun and former StorageTek.

But it's is one of the last tape company entering into LTO-5 after HP, IBM, Overland, Oracle, Spectra Logic, Tandberg, etc.

In fact, the company offers two LTO-5 drives, a half-height and a full-height version. There are only two manufacturers of LTO-5 drives: HP and IBM.

Now the dilemna for StorageTek's users - and it's the same for IBM's customers - is to choose between several types of tape cartridges for high-end libraries:

  • LTO-5 or two other proprietary cartridges more expansive but more reliable and with faster performances (1TB T1000 or eventually fastest T9840 at only 75GB) for StorageTek,
  • LTO-5 or proprietary JB/JX media up to 1TB for IBM.
Other companies involved in high-end tape automation products include Overland, Quantum, Qualstar and Spectra Logic, but this market is more and more in competition with disk-based archiving systems with compression and with or without de-dupe.

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