Historical perspective lends better understanding of the choices... LTO was originally to come in two flavors: - A dual-hub, high-performance 3570-like, cartridge called Accelis; - A single-hub high-capacity cartridge called Ultrium. Accelis did not make it to market because the need was more for capacity than speed, and Ultrium's performance was deemed "good enough" for all-around use.
Ultrium remains an affordable, mid-range, open-systems tape technology, better at streaming than start-stop. Proprietary Magstar 359x technology continues to occupy the high end, with superior start-stop characteristics which make it the best choice for primary storage pools. Various documentation compares technologies, such as: "IBM LTO Ultrium Performance Considerations" ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/tivoli/whitepapers/wp-tsm-lto.pdf >They do look nice, but I still hate the thought of the dataloss, if one cart >gets damaged or fails. ooooh. (chuckle:-) People were saying the same thing when 3490E allowed us to put a whole gigabyte onto a tape cartridge. It's all relative. Richard Sims http://people.bu.edu/rbs
