Oracle updates StorageTek to take tape to 150PB

Oracle has announced a series of improvements to its StorageTek tape storage lineup, expanding the size of possible systems to 150PB.

The StorageTek SL8500 has its tape slot capacity increased from 70,000 to 100,000 tape slots and now supports the LTO-5 format drives capable of storing 1.5TB, which will allow massive archives.

“The conventional wisdom is that the tape market is dying but not dead yet,” Charles King, principle analyst at Pund-IT.

“What we're seeing with tape is that rather than being an active part of a companies storage requirements it's being relegated to an archive role. This move by Oracle is obviously aimed at that market in the large scale enterprise storage sector.”

Oracle said that the system was optimised to work with Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, Exadata V2, Oracle Database 11g, Fusion Middleware 11g and Sun servers

“Large tape users now have the capacity to accommodate the explosion of data in their organizations” said Jim Cates, vice president of Tape Development at Oracle.

“Only Oracle’s StorageTek enterprise tape solutions enable customers to easily scale capacity to upwards of 150 petabytes in one, easy to manage storage system.”

Tape vendors are increasingly releasing storage systems supporting the LTO-5 format in order to capitalise on low-cost mass archiving systems.