History 2005: LTO Extends Roadmap

With Quantum’s unveiling of its new  roadmap for DLT-S through 2011, the LTO Program – which Quantum is part of, incidentally – needed to react, since it’s  own roadmap stopped with the LTO-4 expected around 2007.

In  the new roadmap, the LTO-4, which should have native 800GB and 80 to 160MB/s has been bumped up to start at 120MB/s. While capacity and transfer rate were doubled with each new generation from LTO-1 to LTO-4, from there on only the capacity doubles, while the transfer rate improves by 50% with each phase.

The official reason: “a recent survey  of 200 IT managers and storage administrators by the LTO Program found that capacity was more than 2x as important to end users as performance.” 

These new developments put DLT-S owner Quantum in a quandary, given that the latter, announcing its  acquisition of Certance, also in LTO, had put the emphasis on differentiating DLT-S for capacity, LTO for performance. On 2nd glance, however, in a comparison of the 2 roadmaps, S-DLT still comes out ahead, even if S-DLT still comes out ahead, even if we need to be careful of reading too much into transfer rate figures, since, from  now on, the LTO  consortium is not releasing a range, but a maximum, while  Quantum still offers a range for all its specs.

WORM cartridges, already offered for LTO-3 as well as DLT-600, will be offered by both camps on their future gen.

In the tape industry, we also need to be  wary of the actual availability dates  of the drives in either technology, as well as their real specifications, having learned in the past that there are often sizeable gaps between  intentions and reality when coming to market.    

DLT-S vs. LTO
This article is an abstract of news published on issue 205 on January 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.