LTFS - Linear Tape File System in LTO Ultrium generations 5 and above.

According to a recent analysis by the Compliance, Governance, and Oversight Counsel, 69 percent of the data saved by organizations have little or no value whatsoever. The wild part of the equation is that organizations pay a substantial amount of money to store this data and make it readily available at any moment in time.

If the majority of data is stored digitally, the costs can grow to astronomical levels. Thus, organizations are faced with either continuing to pay for data that is never going to be used or they are tasked with the challenge of sorting through the data in order to eliminate and/or move it to a more cost-effective storage system.

This objective can be extremely time-consuming and difficult, given the huge amounts of data that most organizations generate on a regular basis.

David Hill, Tech guru and writer for NetworkComputing.com, suggests that tape offers a cost-effective alternative to disk drives. What’s more, LTO tape’s recent adoption of the LTFS (Linear Tape File System) makes writing to tape as easy as writing to disk.

Thanks to IBM, the LTO Consortium – which is comprised of HP, Quantum, IBM, and other key brands – LTFS became a reality. This makes tape much more functional and realistic for organizations seeking to access important data 24 x 7.

The next step for IBM in the world of LTO tape is the integration of the General Parallel File System (GPFS) with LTFS. The company announced at EDGE 2013 in Las Vegas that now customers can effectively move data from hard disks directly to tape. This makes the transfer of massive amounts of data more plausible.

Hill suggests that organizations consider storing their “no-value” data on LTO until their leaders can decide on what data to keep and what data to discard. This allows for HDDs to be freed up for the most relevant data.

To take advantage of LTFS, you must invest in either LTO-5 or LTO-6. Earlier LTO formats didn’t include LTFS. Regardless of what brand of LT0-5 or LTO-6 you choose, you can be sure you are gaining technology that will last for decades.