Next-gen tape battle: Fast heads vs. fast tape

摘要

For the next generation of enterprise-class tape systems, the battle lines are being drawn among LTO, backed by HP, IBM and Seagate; SuperDLT, backed by Quantum; and Mammoth-2, backed by Exabyte. While LTO (see p. 25, "HDD technologies key to Ultrium tape") and SuperDLT will not debut until later this year, Exabytes Mammoth-2, which sports a native uncompressed thoughput rate of 12 MB/sec on writes, has already begun shipping. But that fact is the least significant difference among these high-end tape alternatives.