A big ‘thank you’ to all of you who attended our webinar entitled “Trends in Tape: Looking beyond LTO-5 with LTO-6 and LTFS.”  We had the best attendance ever. This is clearly a topic of great interest to many of you out there.  Bob Cone hosted the call and the discussion was packed with a multitude of great information including LTO-6 and the overall LTO Roadmap.  But more importantly, Bob covered the implications of the roadmap and LTFS and how they fit into the overall storage picture. With so many technologies now available, storage hierarchies and designing and choosing the right building blocks for your environment continues to get more complex.  The presentation distilled much of the vast amount of available information on numerous storage alternatives into an easy-to-understand discussion. Tape, Disk and Solid State Disk / Flash were covered including where they fit now, and where they will fit in the future.  The session was recorded and is available at the link below:

Looking beyond LTO-5 with LTO-6 and LTFS

The webinar underscores how LTO-6 fits into the LTO Roadmap and its important performance and capacity improvements over past generations. It also points out the advantages of LTO-6, which is why you may be interested in Spectra’s LTO-6 Pre-Purchase program. 

How many times have you thought about buying a new car, computer, TV, or cell phone but when you found out a new technology was just around the corner, you waited?  Personally, I need to upgrade my iPhone and considered the current 4S, but am waiting for the iPhone 5. Like me, you hold off and limp along with the old technology, anxiously awaiting the new technology.  Well, when it comes to LTO technology, you don’t have to wait.  Spectra is offering our customers a cost-efficient path to get the latest LTO-5 tape drive technology available today, along with an LTO-6 option, where they will receive an LTO-6 drive to replace the -5, as soon as the LTO-6 is available. 

In addition, this is a great opportunity for customers currently on LTO-3 drives:  LTO-6 drives have read/write compatibility with one generation back (LTO-5) and read only with two generations back (LTO-4).  So, if you have LTO-3 drives and media and want to move to a new generation, you could upgrade to the LTO-6 Pre-Purchase option now, get LTO-5 drives now and replace ALL the LTO-3s, read and re-write the data to LTO-5 media.   Then, when LTO-6s are available through the pre-purchase program (with no additional cost), swap out the LTO-5 drives, and be able to read/write with the LTO-5 media.  Otherwise, if you wait and go straight to the LTO-6 drives, you will need some other way to migrate your LTO-3 media, as it will be unreadable with the LTO-6 drives.

Everything is handled at the time of ordering the LTO-5 drives, so when the LTO-6 is available, we would contact you and find out when you would like us to ship the new drives.  Then you just send the LTO-5 drives back.  And all this is done with no additional paperwork.  The new LTO-6 tape drive will double capacity and provide a 50% increase in performance over LTO-5.  With a larger compression history buffer, the expected compression ratio will go from 2:1 to 2.5:1, so LTO-6 will offer a compressed capacity of 8 TB and data transfer rates of up to 525 MB/second.  The sixth generation of LTO tape drives provides many positive implications for IT and business managers and we are excited to offer you our LTO-6 pre-purchase program: LTO-5 today and the ability to be one of the very first to get LTO-6 and all its advantages when it becomes generally available.
 

Dear Ms. Meade:
How would an enormous up-front capital expenditure (aka CapEx) for a T-Finity reduce my capital expenditures? By definition, reducing CapEx means spending less, but you're saying if I fork out a lot of money, I'll spend less? Where is that logic? And reduce my operating expenditures? (OpEx)? T-Finity will do all that--is it a toaster and a floor wax, too?

Signed,
Doing Fine With My Powderhorn

Dear Doing Fine:
So glad to hear that things are going well in your world.

Would you be interested in what is going on in the real world?  It turns out that old technology is expensive. Tried to get spare parts for your Model T lately? How about finding truly floppy floppy-disks (the 8x8 inches model) for your Atari?

At some point, it's more expensive to keep old technology, given long-term expenses, than to replace it. Once we talk about replacing something, you are looking at your capital expenses. And the T-Finity does reduce Capex considerably. This part is very straightforward: costs less up-front, doesn't require extra software applications and  servers to run them--in fact, once you buy the T-Finity, you have what you need--partitioning (that's right, no database, no server and no external application, as required by the other very large libraries), encryption (that's right, no external software or hardware as required by the other very large libraries), and remote management (once again, no external anything needed). Right there, you've reduced your capital expenditures compared to the other guys.

Operating expenses falls right into line with this. Didn't I say NO external software, hardware, anything? Those typically  come laden with service agreements and idiosyncratic interfaces.  In my world, that means more parts to manage and to break, more software to learn, and more service agreements to pay. I’m not so sure about your world.

As to the floorwax part--T-Finity lets you use more floorwax, given that it uses so much less data center space. Alternately, you could put some other equipment in the saved space. And the amount of power a T-Finity uses is approximately that used by a toaster--but only when the library is really, really busy, and depending on how you configured it.

The expenses associated with your aging and soon-to-be no-longer-supoported Powderhorn are obvious and inescapable. Sometimes, you have to do the math and face hard financial realities. When that happens for you, please remember that the T-Finity is fabulous. (Yes, Ms. Meade E. Ahmogul gets paid by Spectra, but it's true anyway.)

I do hope you enjoy your Powderhorn and its savings on floor wax (as much as ten dollars). I also hope that, once you switch to T-Finity, you enjoy savings on space, power, and more (savings that will be in the thousands of dollars, even after you subtract the ten dollars on additional floor wax).

Sincerely yours,

Ms. Meade E. Ahmogul