What is an LTO Storage Solutions/Archive?
LTO (or Linear Tape Open) is a tape format that is approaching its 9th generation and started in 2000 with a capacity of 100GB. LTO is an open standard, developed by HPE, IBM and Quantum, using half-inch tape media and offers mid to high performance and capacity. Individual tape media (LTO9 has 18TB native capacity) is automated using a tape library, consisting of many media slots and a smaller number of tape drives. The library contains a picker mechanism to move the correct media to a drive for reading or writing. LTO is a sequential media – starting at the beginning and using a serpentine writing method to fill the entire media. Individual files cannot be deleted, only a complete erase will remove data already written.