While IBM has made an official announcement of its plan to begin LTO3 shipment on December 17, HP has yet to formally announce what it said will be LTO3 shipments beginning four days before that.
Certance began shipments in October, the first time it has beaten IBM and HP to market with a new generation of the so-called ‘superdrive’ mid-range tape drive. But IBM has claimed that its implementation of the standard is faster than that from Certance.
While both companies have doubled the capacity of LTO2 to 400GB uncompressed in LTO3, IBM is claiming 80MB/sec uncompressed throughput compared to Certance’s claim of around 70MB/sec.
IBM’s shipments will begin with low-end standalone autoloaders, with a SCSI interface. In the first quarter next year it will ship Fibre Channel LTO3 drives fitted to IBM tape libraries. Previous OEM buyers of IBM LTO drives have included ADIC, SpectraLogic, Qualstar, and Exabyte. IBM said it has shipped the latest drive to un-named OEMs
All three LTO drive makers are expected to add WORM support by the middle of next year. Demand is just beginning to grow, and it will be important, said IBM’s program manager Bruce Master.
