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IBM has announced three LTO-9 tape drives for usage in tape library TS4500. The drives are available from September 10th 2021

 

IBM®️ LTO®️-9 models F9C, F9S, and S9C are designed for the heavy demands of backup and archive tape storage, and can help improve data center economics. The number of tape drives, cartridges, and associated floor space may be reduced with LTO-9 models, delivering higher performance and greater capacity as compared to IBM LTO-8 tape drive models.

IBM LTO-9 features help improve performance and reliability:

  • Native data transfer rate of up to 400 MBps for full-height (FH) tape drives
  • LTO Generation 9 media specification tape cartridge compressed capacity of up to 45 TB (18 TB native)
  • 8 Gbps Fibre Channel dual-ported drive attachment on models F9C and F9S
  • 12 Gbps dual-ported SAS attachment on model S9C
  • A 1 GB internal buffer
  • Support for media partitioning and self-describing tape with IBM Spectrum®️ Archive Enterprise Edition
  • LTO-9 encryption support
  • Open Recommended Access Order (oRAO) allowing any compatible applications to retrieve content stored on the tape in a more efficient way
  • Support for new and field merge IBM LTO-9 (3588-F9C, 3588-F9S, and 3588-S9C) drives into 3584 models L55 and D55
  • LTO-9 cartridge capacity of up to 417 PB per library (up to 1.04 EB with 2.5 to 1 compression)

https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/9/897/ENUS121-069/index.html&request_locale=en

 

LTO-9 cartridges were announced, too

https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/0/897/ENUS121-070/index.html&request_locale=en

Thanks for sharing. Nice to see tape progressing.

Yes 😀 especially after generation 9 was delayed more than a year…

And this is a real new generation, not a “half generation” like Gen 8.

Thanks for this information @JMeixner ! Its good to see these products finally arrive (with delay). I hope other manufacturers follow the example soon.

Quantum has announced LTO-9 drives, too

https://blog.quantum.com/2021/09/07/announcing-availability-of-lto-9-tape-drives-in-enterprise-and-midrange-tape-systems/

So HPE, Quantum, IBM and FujiFilm announced new LTO-9 drives and tapes. On a German page (https://www.heise.de/news/Magnetbandspeicher-LTO-9-Baender-mit-18-TByte-Kapazitaet-erscheinen-endlich-6187389.html) I also saw an announcement of Sony. So all manufacturers of LTO devices and tapes are ready to go!

As far as I know is FujiFilm a cartridge manufacturer, they don’t make own drives.

And HPE has not announced LTO-9 drives up to now, cartridges only.

 

Haven’t heard from DellEMC about LTO-9….

As long as we never see such patent litigation like with LTO-8 again :disappointed:

https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/08/06/lto-8-tape-media-manufacturing-block-mysteriously-blown-away/

https://www.backupworks.com/LTO-7-Type-M-explained-for-LTO-8-Drives.aspx

 

 


Yes, this was really bad… :scream:

Yes that was bad but interesting at the same time.

Interesting article about tape in general and LTO-9 in special.

https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/news/lto-9-products-launch/

 

Interesting article about tape in general and LTO-9 in special.

https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/news/lto-9-products-launch/

 

Good reading, thanks for sharing!

Be aware: Veeam will fully support LTO-9 with version 12, not with version 11a, as it needs a hotfix to support the new initialization process of LTO-9.

 

See the “Word from Gostev” on this topic:

“LTO-9 is now generally available, increasing native media capacity to 18TB and bringing 400 MB/s transfer rates! I still remember how 5 years ago I was writing here about Barium Ferrite (BaFe) tapes being on the horizon – well, we've reached that horizon! Aside from increased density this technology apparently improves reliability: BaFe LTO-9 tapes are rated to maintain stable magnetic characteristics for over 50 years! This is exciting and all, but when will Veeam Backup & Replication support LTO-9? While we fully prepared V11 for LTO-9 based on tech preview hardware testing IBM has arranged for us in October 2020, now that we tested the commercially available hardware we discovered one significant change: a new requirement to initialize new LTO-9 tape media prior to use, which was not there in our preliminary testing. Further, was saw this process taking anywhere from 20 to 120 minutes, making our tape jobs fail due to exceeding timeouts. And unfortunately the issue came too late for us to address in V11a, which is already in the Release Candidate stage. So now, our plan is to release a hot fix for V11a to prevent jobs from failing, and then add some proper integration with this new tape initialization process in V12. “

Thanks for sharing.

And here’s the fresh KB article to the initalization problem mentioned by @JMeixner.

https://www.veeam.com/kb4213

Thank you @regnor for adding the KB article 😎👍🏼

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