LTO Ultrium Cartridge Approved By Storage Companies

EMTEC announced this week that its LTO Ultrium tape cartridge has received certification from Ultrium tape-drive manufacturers IBM, Hewlett Packard and Seagate, confirming the EMTEC Ultrium cartridge’s compatibility with those manufacturer’s tape drives.

LTO Ultrium is an open standard designed to replace Quantum’s DLT. LTO Ultrium magnetic tape cartridges were developed aby the LTO Consortium and EMTEC for storage-intensive backup and archiving in network servers and automated tape libraries. LTO is an open storage medium format, capable of being produced and sold by qualified MTC manufacturers. The EMTEC Group was one of three original LTO licensee manufacturers.

According to EMCTEC, its Ultrium products have a chip in the cartridge for increased efficiency. Through this, the Ultrium drive communicates via a non-contact passive radio frequency signal with the Ultrium cartridge’s 32 KB non-volatile memory (EEPROM) allowing calibration, manufacturer’s and initialization data to be retrieved from the cartridge before it is loaded.

The LTO Consortium’s “Road Map” for future Ultrium development calls for a new generation to be launched every two years or so. The first generation Ultrium can store up to 200 GB of data at a compression ratio of 2:1. EMTEC’s first generation Ultrium has a data transfer rate of between 20 and 40 MB per second for compressed data. The second generation Ultrium will store 400 GB of compressed data, the third 800 GB, and the fourth up to 1.6 terabytes–on a metal film. EMTEC’s Ultrium product line includes four magnetic tape cartridges with storage capacities of (compressed/ uncompressed) 10/20, 30/60, 50/100 and 100/200 gigabytes.