LTO-7 Support for Sphere 3D’s NEO Tape Libraries and Autoloaders

Sphere 3D Corp. announced that its NEO Series of tape libraries and autoloaders, offered by its wholly-owned subsidiary Overland Storage, support the LTO-7 tape format.

NEO T48

The company support of the recently unveiled LTO-7 tape technology expands the company’s portfolio of offerings that equip large-scale, hybrid environments with lower cost, more energy efficient and increasingly reliable storage and archiving solutions. 

NEO Series tape libraries provide a compelling, cost-effective and long-term storage solution by delivering best-in-class features for SMB and enterprise backup and archive applications. When configured with LTO-7, NEO tape libraries and autoloaders are designed to deliver up to 140% increases in storage capacity and more than 80% increases in data throughput.

Next-generation LTO-7 technology provides up to 15TB of compressed data per cartridge, compared to the 6.25TB offered in previous-generation LTO-6 tape drives. Data transfer rates also occur more rapidly with LTO-7 at rates of up to 750MB/s or 2.7TB of data per hour per drive. The NEO Series tape libraries with LTO-7 technology provide customers with solutions capable of delivering up to 8PB of storage capacity at speeds of up to 64TB/hour for $.02/GB.

“Sphere 3D delivers a diverse portfolio of data management solutions that are workload optimized to address divergent use-case scenarios and customer needs,” said Nilesh Patel, VP, product management and marketing, Sphere 3D. “Tape-based storage continues to be an integral part of the storage hierarchy as many enterprises recognize it as the most economical approach for the backup and archiving of multiple terabytes to petabytes of data. Also, an increasing number of enterprises desire a dual storage approach and leverage tape backup as an ‘insurance policy’ for long-term, off-site retention to protect some or all of their cloud-based storage.“

Patel continued: “Our customer base clearly recognizes the ongoing role tape plays as an affordable storage solution. We have seen 114% growth over the last 3 years in the amount of data being stored on tape. Also, the LTO technology roadmap anticipates 120TB on a cartridge and data rates of nearly 10TB/hour. With our NEO series, we give the enterprise the price, capacity, performance and scalability options they are seeking today, while ensuring their investment protection for the future.“

Company’s NEO Series of products are in use by over 200,000 users worldwide in a variety of applications, including backup and archive for medical imaging, finance, education, government, oil and gas, media and entertainment, and retail. The NEO Series product range provides a variety of solutions designed for businesses of all sizes from SMEs to large enterprises.

NEO Xl-60

Product highlights
NEO XL-Series libraries address the need for mid-range and enterprise businesses to do more with less by providing an effortless automated backup that combines flexibility, density, high-performance and affordability to enable data to be protected faster, smarter, more easily and cost effectively. The product family allows customers to customize their backup and archive solution by starting out as a six unit, 80 cartridge, six-drive library and scaling to as many as 560 slots and 42 tape drives as customer backup and archive needs change. The NEO 8000e archive and backup system for the most demanding enterprise complements the NEOxl line by delivering exceptional functionality and storage of up to 1,000 cartridges and 24 tape drives.

The NEO S-Series family of libraries, as well as our stand alone tape drives, address smaller capacity requirements by combining ease of use, compactness and affordability with 1, 2 and 4 unit solutions that range from 8 to 48 slots, and 1 to 4 tape drives.

Shipment of the LTO-7 based NEOxl and NEO 8000e platforms, and LTO-7 media, will begin in December. LTO-7 for the NEO S-Series, and company’s desktop and internal stand-alone tape drives, will begin shipping in Q1 2016.

MSRP starts at list price of $4,999 for a NEO tape library solution.