Spectra Logic announced today its Linear Tape Open (LTO) -5 tape drive pre-purchase program. Customers who select the LTO-5 pre-purchase option can receive an LTO-4 drive today for use until LTO-5 drives become available. With the LTO-5 pre-purchase program, customers have complete drive technology and investment protection.

“Spectra Logic’s LTO-5 pre-purchase program is an economical choice that will allow us to scale up without worry,” said John Funke, manager of network engineering, ON24 Inc. “When LTO-5 becomes available, we’ll be ready and able to drastically increase capacity and performance—without any major configuration changes—while keeping the same footprint in our data center.”

The Spectra Logic LTO-5 pre-purchase program provides LTO-4 drives to customers immediately and replaces those loaned drives with LTO-5 when available. LTO-5 is expected to ship from Spectra Logic in April 2010.

“Solid State Solutions (S3) is taking advantage of this Spectra Logic exclusive program– no other library or drive vendor offers LTO-5 on pre-order,” said Gurdip Kalley, business development manager of S3, an Elite SpectraEDGE channel partner based in the United Kingdom. “The unique pre-purchase option gives us an advantage as a reseller, as customers can take advantage of LTO-4 technology today and are guaranteed an upgrade when LTO-5 becomes generally available. We anticipate that 30 percent of our customers will take advantage of Spectra’s attractive LTO-5 tape drive pre-purchase program.”

“Spectra’s exclusive program is particularly advantageous for customers purchasing new libraries today but who would prefer to have the capacity and throughput benefits of LTO-5. US Federal customers purchasing in the September budget cycle and those seeking a drive refresh are able to invest in the next generation technology today,” said Molly Rector, Spectra Logic’s vice president of marketing and product management. “LTO’s consistent and predictable roadmap has enabled storage consolidation and ease of management with 85 to 100 percent increased capacity with each new release. LTO continues to be the standard in half-inch tape technology.”

Spectra’s LTO-5 drives will include a dual port, native 8Gb fibre channel interface that is compatible with existing 2 gigabit (Gb) and 4Gb fibre channel switches and host bus adapters. LTO-5 will have a native capacity of 1.5 terabytes and an expected native transfer rate of up to 140 megabytes per second. Both capacity and transfer rate can be doubled with compression. LTO will read LTO-3 tapes and read/write LTO-4 and LTO-5 tapes. LTO-5 drives will be fully compatible with Spectra's BlueScale Encryption and Key Management, Spectra's Media Lifecycle Management (MLM), drive-level AES-256 bit encryption key generation and WORM media capabilities.

Availability

Spectra Logic’s pre-purchase program is available now to both end users and channel partners worldwide for Spectra’s T-series tape libraries. The Spectra T950, T680, T380, T200, T120 and T50e libraries are all LTO-5 ready and eligible for pre-purchase. LTO-5 pre-purchase customers will be first to receive LTO-5 drives from Spectra when released.