History 2005: Tandberg Now LTO Drive Manufacturer

There are now 4 and not just 3 LTO drive makers. HP, IBM and Quantum/Certance have been joined by Tandberg Data, which launched a halfheight LTO-2 unit designed by Tandberg Storage, for which the manufacturing is subcontracted to Lafe, a disk and tape head manufacturer in China.

There were already 2 half-height devices, one from HP, already old, the LTO-1 UItrium 215 (100/7.5) and the more recent LTO-2 CL 400H (200/20) from Certance.

Tandberg’s new LTO-2 420LTO (200/24) has 2 original specs: its transfer rate of 24MB/s is 20% greater than that on the CL 400H, and, compared to its 2 competitors, the drive is not as long, 213mm compared to 226mm. The advantage here is that the smaller form-factor of the 420LTO is the same as that of CD or DVD drives, which will allow for easier integration into servers, according to Kjekk Oyvind Aasene, enterprise accounts director at Tandberg Data. He also emphasized the low power consumption of 18W when operating and 9W in standby. The units have already been shipped to key customers.

“We have signed more than one OEM,” confirmed Aasene, although he gave no names.

It wouldn’t surprise us if one of them turned out to be IBM, its historically largest OEM for SLR drives, particularly since Big Blue doesn’t make any half-height LTO units. Tandberg will also sell them through the current distribution channel.

The 420LTO is available as of this month, with an SCSI interface at an estimated street price of $1,995.

The company expects to release a half-height LTO-3 drive next year. It’s conceivable that Tandberg is venturing into LTO in order to replace SLR in  the future.

But according to Aasene, this is not the reason: “We will continue to evolve the SLR drives, of which we’ve sold more than 3 million units.” 

The new LTO drive will of course integrate onto the 1U StorageLoader (1/8) already announced for Quantum’s VS160 cartridges (SN 7/04), which will make it the first and sole 1U LTO autoloader thus far.

By the end of January, Tandberg had already produced 450 of the new 420LTO drives, and received approval from Microsoft for a software driver, while qualifying Yosemite’s TapeWare backup software.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 207 on April 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.