Newcomers in LTO-6

Fujifilm Recording Media U.S.A., Inc., a division of Fujifilm Corporation, introduced its new LTO-6 data cartridge.

It’s the first in the world produced with barium ferrite magnetic particles using Fujifilm’s core Nanocubic technology.

It offers a compressed (2.5x) storage capacity of 6.25TB with a transfer rate of up to 400MB/s.

"At Fujifilm, our technological advances are based on Fujifilm’s proprietary core technologies, and these help us meet the rapidly increasing demands that our customers have for long term file storage and data management," said Peter Faulhaber, president, Fujifilm Recording Media USA "Fujifilm chose to use Barium Ferrite magnetic particles instead of the current metal particles, because Barium Ferrite is chemically stable, which leads to enhanced performance and longer archival life."

Nano Technology
Thse LTO-6 data cartridges use Fujifilm’s advanced Nanocubic coating process, which incorporates three Fujifilm proprietary technologies:

Nano-particle Technology: Finer particles (30% smaller than metal particle used on LTO-5)
Nano-dispersion Technology: Uniform particle dispersion by applying high-dispersed binder.
Nano-coating Technology: Improved ultra-thin layer coating to realize an even thinner magnetic layer.

As part of Fujifilm’s overall commitment to develop environmentally sustainable products, LTO-6 cartridge offers a reduction on its impact on the environment by eliminating brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from all the mechanical parts of LTO-6 cartridges. Tape is already viewed by many in the data storage industry to have less of an impact on the environment than other storage options because it consumes less energy.

LTO technology is a an open tape format developed and enhanced by the HP, IBM and Quantum to help address the demands of data protection in the midrange to enterprise-class server environments.

LTO-6 Features
Fujifilm LTO-6 cartridges offer more space to record specific cartridge information, with the introduction of a 16K Cartridge Memory (IC chip). This feature allows the user to record cartridge load/unload history and monitor the cartridge health.

High-rigidity reel design prevents hub deformation, which could result in tape edge damage. This feature is important as the tape length gets longer and thinner.

LTO-6 cartridges with BaFe have a long archival life (over 30 years) and show good performance when used with older drives that have aged from repeated use.

LTO-6 hardware will be backward write compatible with LTO-5 cartridges and backward read compatible with LTO-4 cartridges. As with the previous generation, LTO-6 hardware will incorporate the Advanced Encryption Standard and LTFS dual partitioning functionality.

Fujifilm’s line-up will include an LTO-6 WORM cartridge, such as storage compliance standards which require a non-rewriteable format.

Largest LTO Assembly Plant in the World
To meet the growing demands of the LTO industry, Fujifilm has restructured its U.S. manufacturing facility in Bedford, MA to increase the assembly capacity, allowing for flexibility and just-in-time manufacturing. As a result, this facility has become the largest LTO assembly plant in the world.

Fujifilm LTO-6 data cartridges will be available through approved Fujifilm resellers.

Comments

At last SNW Europe, we got some explanations concerning the lower than expected based specs of LTO-6. It was supposed to be native 3.2TB, 210MB/s and is finally 2.5TB and 160MB/s. According to Fujifilm's representatives, the problem concerned the cartridges, not the drives or their GMR heads. They said that a compromise was reach between the tape manufacturers that are using different technologies, Nanocubic with barium ferrite magnetic particles for Fujifilm - that could reach the initial specs - and metal particles, for the media with 2,176 tracks (1,280 in LTO-5).

Today all the tape makers involved in LTO have announced their generation 6: Fujifilm, Maxell, Sony, TDK (Imation).

Tandberg stated: "LTO-6 media pricing starts at a MSRP of $110."

Here is a chart of historical LTO media pricing by Spectra Logic:
spectra_logic_lto_540

LT0-6 drives have been released by IBM (TS1050) last October with Fujifilm media and will be revealed probably next month by HP as its units are already announced by Quantum, these three companies being the founding members of the LTO program.

Normally, LTO-6 is supposed to have the same following specs as LTO-5: FH and HH units with 8Gb FC or 6Gb SAS interface, read/write former generation (LTO-5) and read only the previous LTO-4, 12s tape load time, 62s average first file access time and 75s rewind time maximum, 29.5 watts power consumption, 250,000 hours MTBF, head life of 60,000 hours, WORM cartridges, LTFS, but with buffer and cartridge flash EEPROM memory capacities doubling at 1GB and 16KB respectively, and 2.5 to 1 LTO-DC - and nor 2 to 1 - which is an implementation of a Lempel-Ziv class 1 (LZ-1) compression algorithm,.

Tape libraries with LTO-6 have been already released by IBM, Overland, Qualstar, Quantum and Tandberg. Spectra Logic will also soon integrate the new cartridges into its robotics.

2013 will be the year of the general availability of LTO-6 products.

Note also that Fujifilm's reps told us that their company has a market share above 50% in non branded LTO media and that they expect LTO-7 - supposed to be at compressed 16TB and 788MB/s vs. 6.25TB and 400MB/s for LTO-6 - for 2015, the firm being ready with its technology to offer the corresponding cartridges.

They also said that Fujifilm is an exclusive provider of tape cartridges for the mainframe libraries based on two proprietary technologies: IBM TS1140 (native 4TB, 250MB/s), last generation based on 3592 drive; and Oracle/Sun/STK T10000C (native 5TB, 240MB/s).