LTO Program Announces LTFS Compliance Verification Testing

Test costs $10,000.

The Linear Tape-Open Program Technology provider companies, HP, IBM Corp. and Quantum Corp., will offer LTFS compliance testing to demonstrate compatibility with the open standard LTFS specification.

Tapes for the initial review cycle can be submitted to the LTO Program for testing starting May 1 through June 30, 2013. This process is intended to verify that an organization's offering produces an LTFS formatted LTO cartridge that complies with the LTFS format specification.

"Before capitalizing on LTO tape capacity and search capability innovations, clients must have confidence that the technology will integrate easily within heterogenous data center architectures," said Chris Powers, director, StoreEver solutions, HP. "By providing compatibility among mixed vendor platforms, LTO technology is gaining rapid marketplace acceptance among organizations that require simplified management and functionality without sacrificing long-term file retention benefits."

LTFS has expanded the role of LTO tape into new categories and applications where customers want the long-term retention benefits of tape but still need to easily find and use files. Companies with these needs are turning to LTO tape with LTFS to offload their digital media from more expensive storage options for archiving and transport.

Leath Mattner, data management for Digital Pictures, leveraged LTFS and LTO-5 tape solutions in the production of James Cameron's Deepsea Challenge project. According to Mattner, the LTO workflow system they used allowed them to "handle all of the camera formats and conform all of the different kinds of media directly from LTO tape which was a huge time saver."

Mark Peters, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, acknowledges that although capacity, performance and cost containment are dominating the headlines in storage, two other aspects are also crucial: providing consistency and being standards-based.

"These areas are precisely why the LTFS compliance testing from the LTO program matters," says Peters. "When users have multiple choices of interoperable solutions, they want to be sure that everything will work as designed. This new compliance testing adds certainty, and will of course help attract users who are thinking of committing to LTO and LTFS."

This LTFS compliance testing will be managed by the LTO Program.

LTFS takes advantage of the new partitioning feature that became available with LTO-5 technology to provide file system access to tape data and easier management such as drag and drop and search functionality. The LTFS specification is an open standard and has been provided to the SNIA for adoption.