Oracle's StorageTek division today announced its highest capacity and fastest tape drive to date -- the company says the T10000C stores up to 5TB of uncompressed data and offers throughput speeds of up to 70 per cent faster than similar products today.
The StorageTek T10000C tape drive has five times the capacity of StorageTek's T10000B tape drive. It's designed to run traditional tape library applications, such as archiving, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and business continuity.
The drive has a maximum data throughput rate of 240 MB/sec, which Oracle claims is 50 per cent to 70 per cent faster than other enterprise-class tape drives available today. For example, LTO-5 tape drives have a maximum uncompressed capacity of 1.5TB and a data transfer rate of up to 140MB/sec.
FujiFilm, which is manufacturing the T1000C drives for Oracle, said the tape cartridge is the first from the company to use nanoscale Barium-Ferrite (BaFe) particles to coat the tape. Fujifilm claims that BaFe particles don't corrode or change chemically over time so that they add to the longevity of the product.
The company also coats both sides of its thinner tape to achieve the higher capacity drives. Typically, tape drives are coated with iron-oxide (Fe) particles, but not barium.
"Fujifilm is paving the way with Barium Ferrite technology, which enables higher recording density with the proven reliability and stability expected from long-term archive media. Oracle's adoption of this advanced media shows their strong commitment to tape innovation," said Norio Shibata, president and CEO of FujiFilm Recording Media U.S.A., in a statement.
The StorageTek T10000C drive, combined with Oracle's StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System using 2:1 compression, is the first tape storage product to scale to an exabyte of capacity.
"The StorageTek T10000C tape drive, coupled with the StorageTek SL8500 and SL3000 enterprise libraries, addresses customer requirements for high-capacity and cost-effective tape solutions enabling them greater efficiency for their backup, archive and recovery needs," said Robert Amatruda, an analyst at IDC, in a statement.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian , or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .
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