IBM® System Storage® LTO Ultrium 6 Tape Drive

• Introduction

          This white paper  describes the performance of the IBM® System Storage® LTO
Ultrium 6 tape drive (LTO-6 tape drive) working on open systems environments.

• LTO-6 Tape Drive Overview

The sixth generation IBM LTO-6 tape drive offers a great storage capacity and an
excellent performance using technology designed for the  mid range  open
systems environment that include IBM System p®, IBM System i® and  IBM
System x®  servers; selected Oracle® and Hewlett Packard® servers
and Intel® servers running supported versions of Microsoft® Windows®
or Linux®.

There are 2 interfaces available for the LTO-6 tape drive:
• 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC-8)
• 6Gb SAS

Both interfaces are available on half and full heights models.
The IBM LTO-6 tape drive offers a native data rate of up to 160 MB/s an increase
of 14% over the previous IBM LTO-5 tape drive.

The IBM LTO-6 tape drive offers a new generation of data cartridge (gen6 media)
that offers a native capacity of 2500GB (6250GB with 2.5:1 compression) 1.7x the
capacity of the previous gen5 tape cartridge generation. This new capacity is
achieved in the same tape length (846m) as the gen5 media due to a higher
density format (gen6 format).

The IBM LTO-6 tape drive will support the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) which
presents the tape storage as a file-based storage system. Additionally the IBM
LTO-6 tape drive is able to read and write previous generation 5 media
and read only generation 4 media to help customers protect their existing
tape investments.

The LTO-6 tape drive features hardware encryption of data, two
interface options,  and two form factors.  The data rate improvement
from the previous generation is 14% and the tape capacity also increases
67% from the previous generation 5.