Another Firm Supporting LTO-6: QStar

QStar Technologies, Inc. announced the support for LTO-6 tape drives and libraries.

By using QStar Archive Manager software with LTO-6 based libraries users can design active archive solutions and take advantage of the LTO-6 increased native capacity (2.5TB per tape), faster throughput (160MB/s native per drive) and backward write compatibility using LTO-5 media and read compatibility to LTO-4 and LTO-5 media.

QStar software virtualizes the tape library and presents the archive as a network share using industry standard CIFS or NFS protocols. This allows users to search and retrieve all data from the archive.

QStar archiving software can be installed on the users’ choice of server using a range of OSs including Windows, Linux, UNIX or Mac OS X. The software offers both proprietary and industry standard file system support, including LTFS. Optimized proprietary file system provides near 100% media utilization and block by block mirroring.

"The LTO Consortium, with the launch of LTO-6, continues its technology roadmap, which started with LTO-1 in 2000. QStar has supported each of the previous LTO generations using our own file system and has, in the last year, introduced LTFS volume-spanning for LTO-5 and now LTO-6," said Riccardo Finotti, president and CEO for QStar. "Today’s LTO-6 technology capacity is larger, faster and significantly more economical, while preserving backward compatibility which is important for investment protection and long-term archiving."

Archive Manager software with support for LTO-6 tape drives and libraries is available and supports archives from terabytes to multiple petabytes. Pricing is per terabyte and based on the online capacity of the archive. QStar supports an extensive list of tape libraries from manufacturers that use LTO-6 drives.