Oracle StorageTek T10000D Tape Drive With WW Record Specs…

Oracle Corp. announced the StorageTek T10000D tape drive, the fastest, highest capacity tape drive, providing an opportunity for cloud service providers to monetize faster than any other storage media.

With 54% more capacity per cartridge over the previous generation, up to 8.5TB native, the T10000D can help customers reduce acquisition costs for data center backup by 35%.

The T10000D stores and retrieves data at up to 252MB/s native, enabling customers to meet backup RTOs and archive SLAs with fewer tape drives. It can achieve data rates 57% faster than LTO-6.

It is also the first tape drive with support for both 16Gb FC and 10Gb FCoE, for next generation converged data centers.

The new capabilities broaden the appeal of tape storage in markets with large file assets, including media and entertainment, oil and gas, healthcare imaging, and cloud services. Cloud service providers can monetize tape faster than disk media due to its longevity, durability and lower cost. In media and entertainment, customers can store five hours of 4K digital content on a single tape cartridge and over 16 million hours of 4K content in a single Oracle StorageTek SL8500 tape library.

Additionally, with LTFS, customers can drag-and-drop multiple LTO LTFS enabled volumes onto a T10000D cartridge for large data consolidation projects.

Both new digital archiving solutions are featured at the IBC2013 conference in Amsterdam.

The T10000D tape drive’s Data Integrity Validation (DIV) feature allows validation without requiring transfer of the data back to the application, enabling customers to schedule more frequent, less resource-intensive data integrity checks over the lifetime of their data.

Supported by StorageTek Tape Analytics health monitoring and reporting software, customers can enhance long term digital data resiliency.

The T10000D is backward read compatible with all three previous generation T10000 tape drives.

It uses the same media as its predecessor, enabling customers to increase capacity 55% without investing in new media.

"Oracle’s new StorageTek T10000D tape drive clearly demonstrates Oracle’s continued leadership and innovation in enterprise tape storage technology," said James Cates, VP, hardware development, Oracle. "With the fastest and highest capacity drive available, customers can accelerate massive consolidation of long-term archives, improve data center efficiency, and lower TCO. When you add LTFS LE capabilities and Oracle innovations in both data integrity and monitoring, Oracle is taking a commanding lead in storage for long-term data retention and archiving."

"The European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) requires a cost-effective and scalable storage solution to archive its large repository of meteorological data – currently 50PB, expected to grow by 45% each year," said Francis Dequenne, principal systems analyst, data handling systems, ECMWF. "The bulk of this data is saved on StorageTek T10000 media, and is retrieved by researchers across Europe and the world, resulting in over 15,000 tape mounts per day. The data is vital to the success of our organization, hence the reliability of the media and tape drives is paramount. We look forward to installing T10000D drives, which will help minimize our costs while allowing us to meet the extreme demands of our tape storage environment."

"With today’s announcement of the StorageTek T10000D tape drive, Oracle has extended its position as tape technology leader with another record breaking tape drive. With no one else to top, Oracle has broken its standing record for maximum native capacity for commercially-available tape of 5.5 TB, held by T10000C since early 2011, with its new 8.5TB StorageTek T10000D drive," said David Reine, senior analyst, The Clipper Group. "This capacity is achieved using the same media that T10000C users have in their data centers today, thereby protecting their media investment for years to come. With the industry’s fastest native throughput at 252MB/s, T10000D is well equipped to simplify existing backup and archive tape environments with fewer cartridges, drives, and libraries. T10000D offers this opportunity for massive consolidation at a total cost that will come as a surprise to most LTO users. According to Oracle’s calculations, a 1PB T10000D solution can cost about 20% less and can consume about 20% less floor space than with LTO-6 in Oracle’s StorageTek SL3000 Library, thus demonstrating that Oracle can deliver enterprise tape technology at a lower total cost than LTO."

"Front Porch Digital is leveraging the newly formed OEM relationship with Oracle to deliver high capacity and performance tape solutions for storing media content. We have successfully qualified the new StorageTek T10000D with our world class DIVArchive software and LYNX cloud based solutions," said Andy Hurt, VP product management, Front Porch Digital, Inc. "We believe this powerful combination will result in an enterprise offering that meets the big data requirements from our customers and will scale with both efficiency and reliability."