Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Seagate Technology Inc have signed up three of the largest tape media manufacturing companies as licensees for their Linear Tape Open storage format for high capacity tapes. The three are Imation Corp, Verbatim Corp and Emtec Magnetics Gmbh, who have each purchased licenses enabling them to produce tape cartridges for the LTO-based Ultrium high capacity format. LTO was launched at the end of last year by HP, IBM and Seagate in an attempt to consolidate standards in the tape storage market (CI No 3,283). LTO combines linear multi- channel and bi-directional formats, along with improvements in servo technology, data compression, track layout and error correction code. In April, the three introduced two formats based on the technology: Ultrium, a high capacity single reel version for storing 100Gb of uncompressed data; and Accelis, a fast access, dual reel version for retrieving data in under 10 seconds, storing 25Gb of data uncompressed. Both tape cartridges and tape mechanisms are available for licensing. The three lead companies will use the technologies themselves, and have so far already licensed it to Accutronics, Fujitsu Ltd, FCPA Intellistor, Hi/fn, Mountain Engineering, NEC Corp and Quantegy. At least four generations of future capacity and performance enhancements have been mapped out, taking capacities up to 200Gb for Accelis and 800Gb for Ultrium uncompressed, each with up to 160MB/sec transfer rates.
