“The industry is seeing a resurgence of tape storage deployments by organisations with growing data repositories, even if they already have disk and cloud, because tape provides the greatest storage capacity at the lowest cost per terabyte with exceptional reliability,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior industry analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Tape technology, such as LTO-9, also offers unmatched air gap protection against ransomware, enabling organisations to protect their data offline and beyond the reach of malevolent threat actors.”

The new ninth generation of LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape technology is designed for even greater data storage density and speed, providing up to 18TB of native capacity per cartridge (up to 45TB with compression) surpassing the capacity of LTO-8 by 50 percent. Full-height LTO-9 drives deliver uncompressed transfer speeds of up to 400 MB/second, almost two times faster than current hard disk drives. In addition, LTO-9 drives are backward compatible with LTO-8 tape media, allowing users to read/write LTO-8 media.

“Today’s news of LTO-9 tape availability confirms the extensibility of this popular open format that was developed more than 20 years ago,” said Nathan Thompson, CEO and Founder of Spectra Logic. “With each generation, new features have been introduced, such as WORM, LTFS and hardware encryption. We recently made software updates for our installed base of thousands of LTO libraries to enable customers to add or upgrade to LTO-9. And since we are the first to offer a tape library – the TFinity -- that can store an astounding exabyte of native data with LTO-9 drives and media, we couldn’t be more excited about the long-term prospects of LTO tape technology for our customers.”

Spectra’s TFinity Tape Library includes Tri-Media – The only tape library to support three tape technologies in the same library (LTO, IBM’s TS 11xx and Oracle’s T10000); Scalable from 3 to 45 frames, over 56,000 slots, with bulk load capability; Advanced dual robotics for higher performance and greater reliability; Maximum compatibility to work with any third-party software package; and custom front library panels that showcase customer brand.