In January of this year, HP made a huge leap forward. They announced the transition of their entire tape storage portfolio to the LTO-6 specification, branding it under the moniker of HP StoreEver Storage. This announcement has massive implications, especially for those organizations that are trying to manage a constantly-growing pool of data, much of which is simply archival data.

The Benefits of LTO-6
For some organizations, this move will prove to be an immediate benefit. LTO-6 gives twice the amount of storage as LTO-5 along with increasing the transfer speed by half.

Transfer rates are estimated to be approximately 1.4 terabytes for each tape drive per hour. This promises to provide a new environment for storing and retrieving cloud computing data, as well as opportunities for disaster recovery configurations. LTO-6 can be scalable and affordable, more so than many of the other archival options on the market today.

Longer Shelf Life
This move may also enable HP customers to better maintain archival data over longer periods of time. LTO-6 cartridges, according to HP, have a shelf life of as much as three decades. A single tape can handle 6.25 terabytes of (compressed) data, giving organizations a whopping 44 petabytes in just one StoreEver tape library.

Big Data Challenges Met
StoreEver offers organizations the opportunity to meet some of the high demands of Big Data. This is especially true in two critical areas: security and compliance.

In fact, more and more companies that are trying to handle the challenges of Big Data are moving back to tape storage. The fragmented way that many organizations currently deal with protecting and retaining data creates unnecessary risk. HP StoreEver allows storage needs to integrate and converge, landing squarely in high-capacity and highly-resilient technology.

Data Integrity
StoreEver uses hardware-based encryption as well as WORM (Write Once Read Many) protection. It also offers support for LTFS (Linear Tape File System) via the management console in HP StoreOpen.

HP’s new LTO-6 StoreEver Storage solutions are available today. If your organization is struggling with solutions to archiving data, this might be the solution you need.