Hello, and welcome to today's webcast announcing record-breaking technology for digital archives. Our speakers for today are Jim Cates, Vice President of Hardware Development, Steve Zivanic, Vice President of Oracle Storage Business Group, and Tom Wultich, Director of Product Management. Just a few announcements before we begin. The menu dock at the bottom of your screen shows icons that allow you to interact with the console. We will be holding a short Q&A session at the end of today's presentation. To submit a question, you can use the Q&A widget on that menu dock. If you are experiencing problems with the program, F5 on your keyboard will refresh your console, or you can close and relaunch the presentation. Now I'll hand it over to our first speaker, Steve Zivanic.
Thanks, Amy. Looking at our agenda for today, we'll first cover an update of the overall tape market and some important changes taking place in the industry, followed by details on our new tape storage products. That said, let's take a look at Oracle's comprehensive storage portfolio. We currently have the Axiom Storage Systems, which are ideal for application consolidation by providing quality of service and deterministic I/O prioritization for each individual application you're running. This also makes them ideal for providing enterprise IT as a service for secure multi-tenancy for application data and user isolation. We also have the newly announced ZS3 models from our ZFS Storage Systems portfolio, which are really designed to thrive in highly virtualized environments, accelerate time to insight, run queries faster, deliver management automation in Oracle Database environments.
Of course, the topic of today's announcement, our StorageTek tape storage portfolio, which will now enable you to scale up to 68 EB of capacity under a single point of control. Together, this portfolio enables us to provide a complete tiered storage solution for any customer environment, be it SAN, NAS, unified storage, high-performance storage, or storage for backup and archive. As you can see here, overall industry tape capacity shipments increased by 12% in 2012 and are projected to grow by 26% in 2013. The key point here is that there are a number of use cases appearing that are driving this resurgence in tape-based storage architectures.
For example, if we take a look at the cloud services space, we see cloud storage providers looking to deploy tape for their deep archival services as it provides significantly greater longevity and durability and is more economical than other media for this class of storage. Simply put, cloud service providers can monetize tape faster than any other media when it comes to deep cloud archives. Also, enterprises are increasingly looking to tape for the massive petabytes of unstructured data that they need to keep stored for compliance and regulatory purposes. Of course, the media and entertainment industry, with the increasing prevalence of high-resolution HD video streams in 2K, 4K, 8K/IMAX formats, are requiring an increasing amount of tape systems to store and archive these massive unstructured content files.
Also, industries such as healthcare, where images have similar data patterns to the many images in the media and entertainment space, are also seeing an increased adoption of tape storage systems. Moving on to the next slide, which b rings us to today's news. We're talking about the world's largest and fastest tape drive. Again, enables 68 EB of capacity under a single point of control. The new T10000D tape drive for Oracle's SL8500 and SL3000 tape systems, as well as our new Linear Tape File System Library Edition, where we're making tape as easy to use and manage as Flash and disk. It's essentially exabyte scale archival storage with a drag-and-drop user interface. Both of these were recently announced at the International Broadcasting Convention.
Our whole portfolio today, we're going to be talking about the focus and the benefits it brings to enterprises of all sizes, as well as key verticals such as media and entertainment, the cloud sector for both public and private instantiations. The bottom line is that there's new tape NAS, there's new archiving breakthroughs. These are new use cases we're going to be talking about for a new era. On that note, Oracle has an OEM pact with Front Porch Digital, a leading provider of digital asset management solutions for the media and entertainment industry. Specifically, Front Porch Digital is now offering Oracle's latest T10000D drive with Front Porch Digital's award-winning DIVA digital asset management software suite and LINX cloud offering.
As Front Porch Digital is a prominent provider in the media and entertainment sector, this partnership will enable Oracle tape solutions to reach a broader audience of customers in need of cost-effective storage for their digital film content and unstructured file archives. If we go to the next slide. We'd also like to highlight an example of a cloud services provider leveraging Oracle tape technology to deliver cloud storage services. T3 Media is a global leader in providing cloud-based storage for the media and entertainment sector, especially for licensing and accessing of enterprise-scale video libraries. Some of their challenges were to digitize, store, and provide access for more than 100,000 new media assets annually. They wanted to ensure long-term data integrity of clients' media assets, and they really wanted to offer a highly available, always-on environment for their clients in the cloud.
Now the solution, the Oracle StorageTek solution that we provided, were petabyte scale storage of our StorageTek SL8500 tape libraries, very fast access and retrieval, and long-term data integrity assurance for all their digital content with our StorageTek T10000 tape drives, and automated file management via StorageTek Storage Archive Manager or SAM. SAM manages all the files across multiple tiers of mixed storage to ensure that T3 Media's service level agreements are achieved. Essentially, here's a prime example of tape storage in action in a large-scale cloud services environment. I'd like to hand it over to Jim Cates, our Vice President of Tape Storage Development, for additional details on these newly introduced tape offerings.
Thanks, Steve. We'll move on to the next slide. This covers our physical tape portfolio that's offered by Oracle. We offer three highly scalable tape libraries. The flagship is the SL8500 that offers almost unlimited scalability and very unique availability features for this portion of the market. This library supports a wide range of tape drives and is deployed by many cloud companies, internet companies, and companies interested in big data. The SL3000 is a rack-like system that scales horizontally, and that goes up to 6,000 slots. When combined with the new T10000D tape drive, that scales up to in excess of 50 PB of native capacity. A very large library in a very small footprint. On the smaller end of the portfolio, the SL150 rack-mount library scales up to 300 slots and supports the LTO portion of the portfolio.
Looking at the tape drives, the T10000D is what we'll discuss today. That is a 4th-generation T10000 product, and we're going to announce record-breaking capacities, throughput, and also some very interesting interfaces for that particular product line. For the mid-range of the market, we continue to offer LTO drives from both vendors in the SL150, SL3000, and SL8500, and we plan to continue that in the future. As part of the portfolio, we also offer software solutions, and that includes the Linear Tape File System, which we'll talk about shortly, along with the archive software, SAM-QFS, which targets HSM and archive capabilities that rounds out the overall offerings of the portfolio. Moving to the next slide, we'll focus first on a new product announcement for the StorageTek Linear Tape File System Library Edition.
This extends our current support of the LTFS software that currently supports T10000 LTO and takes that capability from a drive level up to a library level, allowing you to scale to extremely high capacities while supporting the LTFS format. Again, the goal is to simplify the overall file access. This enables very easy file transport and finally enables overall to simplify the file management associated with your tape storage. With that, I'll turn it over to Tom Wultich, who will go into a few more details about the software.
Thank you, Jim. Before we get into LTFS and what it does, let's just take a quick step back and look at how tape is accessed today without something like LTFS. What typically is done is an application maintains its own file index and then writes the actual data to a data cartridge. The most important thing to note on this slide is where the index is, which is not on the actual cartridge. What that really means, if you take a look at the next slide, is that in order to retrieve any files from tape, you would actually need the application itself in order to get to the right file, in order to find the right file. However, with LTFS, because we write the file index on the cartridge with the file, you only need the cartridge.
You no longer need the actual application to find any particular file. That's important for two reasons. Number one, for transportability, and we'll talk about that in just a moment. You can now ship LTFS cartridges, be the T10000 or LTO from Oracle StorageTek, anywhere in the world, and you have a self-describing cartridge that has the index on it as well as any files, so you can find what you want from something that you received from any other location. The other thing that you get, which is very important for digital archives and preservations, is by having files and file indexes independent of the application that you can search and find things.
If your application were to go obsolete, as long as there's another application that can read the format of that particular file, which could be MPEG, JPEG, or whatever, you can still access your data that you're trying to preserve. That's a huge step up for tape, and it really puts it on a par with disk and also thumb drives in terms of having a self-describing format that you can ship and maintain separately from the application. This just shows that you can actually transport tapes, as I said, from one location to another safely, securely, and of course, cost-effectively. If you look at the cost of tape versus a thumb drive or a disk would be a bit dangerous to ship, but even if you did it, tape is by far the most economical and safest way to ship something and ship very large files.
There are many use cases for LTFS. Starting in media and entertainment, one of the more obvious one is remote capture of content, and that needs to be shipped from some remote location back to a place where it can be edited. To give you an idea of the type of scale we're looking at here, a modern camera can be up to 85 TB for 24 hours of video. Imagine trying to do that with thumb drives, or even if you're willing to risk the danger of shipping disks, trying to do that with disk drives. It's just not feasible. However, with the tape cartridge capacities that we have today and what we're about to talk about, it is quite feasible, and it is also much more economical to use tape.
Hence the value of the self-describing cartridge, where the application doesn't have to be aware of which cartridge, which file was written on and where. We can now take video files from remote locations and ship them back for editing, and the cartridge is indeed a self-describing cartridge with the file index and the files on it. With LTFS, you can drag and drop files between disk and tape. You can move a file from disk to tape and from tape back to disk. One of the other demos we do for customers is dragging and dropping files between our T10000 family cartridges and LTO. The value for that would be if a customer is using LTO to interchange files with other customers or remote locations, they can use LTO as an import-export media.
They can use the T10000 for their main archive, benefiting from the vast, huge capacities that the T10000 offers, as well as the TCO savings that the T10000 family offers. They can have a main archive at T10000, drag and drop files to either HP or IBM LTO drives, and then use that as an import-export mechanism. This truly makes tape as usable as disk or Flash, and it actually also, with Oracle StorageTek, it cuts across the different technologies of tape as well. What we're announcing today is extending what we already had for LTFS to now encompass an entire library. Now someone's digital archive in their automated tape library from Oracle StorageTek, you can have LTFS, and you can have those self-describing cartridges inside the library.
You can import and export in and out using this same application, and you can do it across all the different media formats that we support. You'll be able to import and export with LTO, for example, and then have as the main archive in that library, the T10000 technology. This does several things. Number one, it opens up the usage of tape to be as convenient and as easy as disk. Number two, it cuts across the different technologies because LTFS is not just an LTO standard. Oracle is a co-chair of the committee for LTFS that is working on making it a standard. Our LTFS Library Edition works with our T10000 family as well as LTO, and it makes each of them as accessible as any other, and we can transport files between them as well as on and off a disk.
Oracle focuses on providing an economic benefit for our customers because we realize, especially in the enterprise space, which is the focus of today's call, that every decision is really also a business decision. It's not just a technology choice. We have advantages in acquisition costs for libraries, drives, media, et cetera. With our LTFS Library Edition, we carry that forward in the software as well. Our experience with customers building archives, they all know that they have a challenge in terms of growth and how to accommodate it. We found that they really don't like software licenses that are pegged to cartridge counts or to capacities or to drive counts and things like that. It's kind of a nuisance whenever you add more drives or cartridges to have to also go add more software licenses.
What we have is a fee for LTFS Library Edition that's just really for a library. As Jim covered our libraries earlier, we have very, very scalable libraries. Once you buy one of those and you buy LTFS Library Edition, as you scale that library out, you don't have to buy additional licenses. It's just simply a library feature that you turn on, and then you just use it, and you grow as you need to grow. In short, you save with Oracle, and the more you grow, the more you will save with Oracle LTFS Library Edition. We are happy to announce that Oracle StorageTek LTFS Library Edition is available.
It's available from Oracle eDelivery, and you can download it just like you download other Oracle software and try it free for up to 30 days to decide if you like it and you want to purchase it for your environment. It's also, in addition to being very easy to use, it's also very easy to purchase. Just to wrap up on LTFS, we're now making tape more accessible, more user-friendly than it ever has been before. Since it is such a great fit for archives, this is something that we view as a key enabling technology for the future of the overall tape industry. With that, I'll turn it back to Jim to talk about the new tape drive.
Thank you, Tom. We'll also cover the second half of our tape announcements. I'm very pleased today to announce our new T10000D tape drive, which represents a giant leap forward in tape technology and demonstrates Oracle's commitment to innovation and storage. Moving to the next slide, we'll go into details about the product. We're pleased to announce an industry-leading 8.5 TB of uncompressed native capacity. With typical compression rates you see in IT data centers of in excess of two to one, this means cartridge capacities can exceed 20 TB when running in compressed mode. The transfer rate is an industry-leading 252 MB per second data rate, and again, that's uncompressed. When running with compressed data, it supports up to 800 MB per second data rate.
This drive has the first 16 Gb ps Fibre Channel interface and also the industry's first 10 Gbps Fibre Channel over Ethernet interface. Two innovations also in terms of interfaces and how you communicate with the tape drive. For those customers using the previous generation T10000 technology, this drive will backread the T10000A, B, and C cartridges, supporting three generations of backward read compatibility. This also a very innovative supporting enterprise market. It reuses the existing T2 Media. For those customers that have T10000C cartridges, they can declare those scratch, put them into the D drive, and now gain the full capacity of 8.5 TB with the new drive technology. This is a real TCO advantage for customers who have a large amount of media that can now be reused at higher capabilities with the new tape drive.
This drive is compatible with the largest SL8500 library, along with the SL3000, and we do continue to offer a rack mount system for those who only need a single drive or dual drives. With that, I'll turn it over to Tom Wultich, who will do some comparisons with other products on the market.
Thank you, Jim. Let's take a look at each of these industry-leading specs one at a time and talk about what they do for customers. Let's start with the capacity. We already had, believe it or not, the world's highest capacity cartridge with our T10000C at 5 TB. It was actually, as you could see, the T10000C at LTO-5 is more than twice the capacity of LTO-6, and it's also higher capacity than other enterprise drives on the market. With the T10000D, we're taking that leadership and extending it even further to 8.5 TB per cartridge. What that does is for someone building a new archive, for instance, it's more than triple the capacity of the best LTO drive, and that means that you can store the same amount of data in a third number of libraries. That's a huge, huge savings.
Huge savings on the acquisition cost of the library and the maintenance cost, et cetera, but also a savings in floor space, and power and cooling. We put the other generations of LTO on here just because LTO-6 is still fairly new, and most of the install base customers are on LTO-4 or LTO-5. In fact, many of them use even generations of LTO because they have to buy media with each new drive to use the capacity, and they can't afford to change all their media out with every generation. A lot of them started with LTO-2 and are on the even number generations. If you look at a typical LTO-4 customer looking at deciding whether or not to move to LTO-6, if they consider the T10000D, you're looking at literally better than an order of magnitude improvement in capacity, which is a massive consolidation capability.
If you already have an Oracle StorageTek library, you can basically get more than 10x the capacity in the library you already own, and you may not need to purchase new libraries for a long time. If you have other people's libraries and you're looking at moving to the new generation of tape drives, if you move to the T10000D, we can consolidate more than 10 to one over what the customer has today. Pretty massive step up in capacity. Likewise, on performance, we are the leader with the T10000D, over any other technology today. Now you can see the comparison with LTO-6, and again, going back to LTO-4 for someone that's looking at, do you go to LTO-6 or maybe consider the T10000D?
Someone in that situation, you could see the T10000D has more than double the throughput of the LTO-4, more than 1.5 times the throughput of LTO-6. Where this matters is most customers do face performance challenges, especially in a rapidly growing archive. You get more performance per drive. We can generally configure a system with fewer drives, with the T10000D, which again, has a nice economic savings for the customer, in addition to a reliability savings as well. A big, big, big improvement and advantage on throughput. Jim alluded to the impressive capacities if you also consider compression, and compression will vary by application. Some applications, the data will not compress at all. That's the one to one over on the left. Y ou can see in open systems data protection, people are quoting two and a half to one now.
You can see the advantage the T10000D brings over the latest generation, most recent LTO drive. As the compression ratios increase, you could see the T10000D maintains a healthy advantage. Part of this, of course, is being the first 16 GB drive available on the market. We're not limited by the pipe on the input to the drive, and we designed a drive, likewise, to handle very, very fast compressed throughput. Again, a big, big advantage for the T10000D, a big step up. Let's bring this home in terms of what does this mean. If you take a customer putting together a 1 PB archive and 500 MB a second is their throughput requirement, what does it look like with the T10000D? You can see how it compares with the different LTO technologies. A massive difference.
Now, what I'd like to take a step back and point out is we designed the T10000D for what we call enterprise customers, and that 1 PB bar is about the entry point. For customers looking to build archives 1 PB and bigger, there are significant advantages to the T10000D. I've highlighted just two so far in terms of capacity and throughput. We'll go into some more. For customers smaller than that, if you go into, say, the SMB space for classic IT backup and things like that, we sell LTO. In fact, we're the market leader in the larger LTO configurations and also in a segment in that rack mount LTO drive in automation segment. We're going to continue to be, and our plan is to continue to do so.
We will carry LTO and sell LTO, and we expect to lead the LTO market in automation for that case. For large archives, we wanted to offer our customers basically a better solution by taking our enterprise technology, extending it beyond the mainframe into big digital archives with high growth rates, because there was a lot of value we can bring. Like I said, I've just covered two of them so far. What is the capacity and throughput mean to the system? We'll get into some more advantages in just a second. You can see a massive advantage over the best LTO technology, then it gets to incredible consolidation capabilities for the install base that's looking at upgrading. I did mention that we do focus on TCO because in the enterprise space, it is a business decision.
For a lot of the large archives are looking at tremendous amounts of data and incredible growth rates, that's tough against the budget. The T10000D is designed not only to run better, but also to deliver a big acquisition cost advantage versus other alternatives. Obviously, with less hardware, less footprint, you get savings on maintenance, you get improvements in reliability, you get savings on floor space, power, and cooling that can be dramatic. One of the things I touched on earlier was about media reuse. With LTO, in order to achieve the specs they use, the latest drive technology requires the latest media cartridge. That's why a lot of customers in LTO, it originally was designed to replace DLT, is what they went after. Most of the DLT customers didn't jump in on LTO-1. They waited for LTO-2.
Because media, especially when you go into the use case of archive, media can be the biggest component of the customer spend compared to drives and libraries. They couldn't afford to buy new media for LTO-3 and buy LTO-3 drives, so they stayed on LTO-2 and waited till LTO-4 came out, and then did the migration and buy all the new media and all the new drives. A lot of customers are doing that every other generation approach for LTO. With the enterprise T10000 family, they don't have to do that. The original T10000A, when we came out with the B, we were able to migrate our customers up to the higher capacity just by buying drives. They got to reuse all their media. We're doing the same with the T10000D.
Everybody that bought the T10000C, all the media that they have for it, they can now reuse in the T10000D at the higher capacity. Again, since that is often the biggest component of the system cost, being able to reuse the media is huge. It means that customers that have the C can actually look at the D. They don't have to wait and try to do the every other generation approach that you see with the LTO technology, for example. I'd also like to point out the T10000C has been the fastest adopted drive in terms of Oracle StorageTek history. The capacity adoption on that drive is faster than anything else we've ever done. Now we're looking to build on the lead that we already have with the T10000C with the new T10000D.
Reusing all that media will actually enable that large, rapidly growing install base of T10000C customers to look at using the D and reap the benefits of all that additional capacity for the media they've already bought. Another concern that archive customers have is they're keeping, again, this is in the backup use case, but archive, where you're keeping the data for a number of years, is being able to read the data back. The T10000D not only reads the C media, it reads the B media, it reads all the way back to the A. We have three prior generations, o r another way to look at it, T10000D drive can read four different generations of T10000 written media all in that same drive.
Again, that has an obvious cost savings of you can just put this in and read all your own media, replace the drives you already have, and that has a big cost savings in terms of support, maintenance, and things like that. Just put in the D, use the D to write the new stuff and also read anything you'd written from any of the three previous generations. Again, another big advantage that you see in an enterprise drive that other drive technologies don't have.
One key point on the T10000D, I talked a lot about the economic benefits and the performance and capacity. Those are the banner flagship You have specs and benefits for a customer. There's a lot of other things to the drive that come from our legacy of doing enterprise drives and drives for the harshest environments, for mainframe environments that do lots of starts and stops and are really rough on tape drives. We could spend a couple hours on how we actually make the drive and how it's different than other technologies that are out there. Just at a high level, I'll touch on these. The first one, the tape path, we guide on the backside of the media. The tape path never touches the data. We do that for obvious data integrity reasons.
The second one about the media itself. In addition to using barium ferrite, which has very nice durability properties relative to metal particulate, which is great for archive customers, the substrate we use is also very different, with the T10000 family, than what's available from other vendors. We use an aramid substrate, which is basically Kevlar, which is the same thing that's used to make bulletproof vest. It's a very strong material. It has a very nice property in terms of when subjected to massive changes in temperature and humidity, aramid doesn't expand and contract nearly as much as other technologies that are used in other tape drives.
What this means, and this is why it's important for archive customers, is if your tape is ever exposed to changes, be it your air conditioning system failed, or you shipped it offsite and it went through whatever environment on its way to some other site, the T10000 is built to handle that much better than any other technology because we invested in the better substrate material. The media validation aspect I'll cover in a moment. That's also huge for archive, and I'll explain that in just a minute. 32 channels, as opposed to using a 16-channel design, compared to 16 channels for any given technology, we can hit the same throughput we could have hit with 16 channels by moving the tape half as fast. That's gentler on the media and makes the media last longer.
It also means fewer passes to fill a cartridge, which again, is more reliable and will make the media last longer. There's lots of advantages that we put into the drive that result in a much better uncorrected bit error rate. It is literally two orders of magnitude better than mid-range technologies. All of these things are, I feel like I've not covered them and done justice to the drive. Just a short list of many things that we do in an enterprise drive, that appeals very strongly and applies very strongly to people in archive who are trying to keep data for many years, and they care about things like durability and reliability.
One of the other things to point out that's just a sample of another advantage is we can make a table and put the specs side by side and show you the comparison. That actually understates our advantage because a customer, this is how they would actually use tape. They were going to write so much data to one of two technologies. With the T10000D, because we have so much higher capacity, you can see it's fewer loads and unloads compared to, in this case, LTO-6, right? It would be massively more compared to the previous generations of LTO. That inherently is more reliable. Loads and unloads on a drive are something that has a wear and tear specification, and it's something that could wear out over time.
You're going to do like a third or even fewer loads and unloads using a T10000D in an archive than you will with a mid-range technology. The other point on here is the amount of time it takes to write the data is also far less because of the throughput advantage. That basically minimizes head wear, makes the drive last longer. You could see a common theme of built for enhanced durability, and it will show up especially in an enterprise archive type of use case. I mentioned that we cover media validation. Let me just take a step back and explain it. There's really two pieces to media validation. First one is if you're building archives, you care about end-to-end data integrity.
In order to do that, the application attaches a CRC to the data and ships it down the Fibre Channel, or in the case of T10000D, could be an FCoE interface to the drive. The drive is checking the CRC versus the data to make sure that the data is received is correct before writing it to tape. Of course, we do a read after write to make sure that what's on the tape is indeed what was the data back at the server. If anything fails a CRC, there's a resend. For media validation, now, that first piece just gives you data integrity. The second part that someone in archive would care about is, I wrote many petabytes of data. I haven't touched some of it for a long time. I hope it's still there, right?
How do I know that it's still there and hasn't been corrupted in some way, shape, or form? The only way to do that up until now, up until the T10000 family addressed this problem, was to read all the data back to the server and compare. Now, that's okay if you're talking about a use case of just a few terabytes or tens of terabytes. When you start building these large digital archives, as our customers are doing, in the many petabyte, tens, hundreds of petabytes, and we do have customers over an exabyte, that's just not feasible. What we've done with the T10000D is built the capability into the drive to have it validate the cartridge. What somebody can do is have a library with T10000D drives and media in it, and then they can allocate a couple of drives for auditing.
There's different choices of how you may want to do your audits. It could be time-based. They could be based upon when you last touched the media, or if our Tape Analytics software suggested that something might be amiss. Whatever it is that the customer chooses as the trigger for audits, the cartridges can then be loaded into a T10000D drive that will compare the CRC versus the data inside the drive without sending all the data back, and then send back a confirmation to the server that everything's fine or indicate that if everything's not fine, then you're notified, and you can then rewrite the data to either that cartridge or another cartridge.
I touched on Tape Analytics as a product that we've launched prior to this, and it's been one of our best-received product launches ever for the simple fact that it gives customers a view into their tape environment they've never seen before. By that, I mean the drive, whenever it writes or reads from a piece of media, it knows a lot about what went on on that write or read. The issue was getting that information out of the drive and then analyzing it and presenting a view to the customer of what's going on. That's where the tape industry as a whole hadn't really provided a good solution. With Tape Analytics, we capture over 150 attributes on every single mount.
It comes out of the drive to the library, and then our libraries have an Ethernet port on them that can be connected to a little Linux server that's running Tape Analytics software. That Tape Analytics software has a few components to it. One of it is an Oracle MySQL database that's capturing all of this, like I said, over 150 attributes, every single mount goes into this database. It has basically our IP from all of our years working and troubleshooting drives and media inside that software so that in this single pane of glass, you can see every drive. You can see a summary of the drives, the media, and all of your libraries that you're connected to.
You can drill down into any problem areas, you can literally drill down all the way to an individual cartridge if you want and see every single mount of that cartridge, what happened on any of those 150 attributes, if you really want to drill down that far. You don't have to. We provide the actual recommendation for you of, "This cartridge is fine," or, "This cartridge is not fine." That information is there for anybody that wants to look at it. The nice thing about it, for the first time ever, you can see what's going on in your environment with the media, with the drive. If you have a problem, it pinpoints what it is so you can fix it. In the past, it was never shown this clearly. We're pretty excited about that.
That is integrated with our libraries, and we do also integrate with our data media validation as well. Tape Analytics is one of the things that can kick off an audit to provide that total data integrity and also simplicity of management that is new for tape, which is great. All right. With that, I think we touched on two huge announcements not done just for Oracle Storage, but for the overall tape industry. In particular, we focused on enterprise archive. One was about making tape much, much easier to use, simplifying the accessibility of tape, and that's LTFS Library Edition.
The other one is our record-setting T10000D enterprise tape drive, which not only blows out the specs on all the banner specs for capacity and throughput, has a whole lot of enterprise features in it, has a lot of advantages for digital archive, but also does it at a very competitive and compelling total cost of ownership relative to anything else on the market. With that, I'll turn it back over to Steve.
Thank you, Tom. If we can move to the next slide here, the key takeaways for today, that obviously data growth continues unabated. Tape is becoming increasingly prevalent across new industries and applications, including media and entertainment as deep archival storage for cloud service providers, as the most economical tier of storage for backup and archive for enterprises, and obviously the healthcare sector. Now, for those companies who truly need to store big data, the ability to scale to 58 EB of capacity under a single point of control provides new meaning to the term big when it comes to storage solutions. Bottom line, Oracle will continue to innovate in its tape storage portfolio and deliver highly efficient solutions that lower customers' total cost for operations and management and deliver optimal levels of performance and value.
We'll continue to out-engineer competitors with products that deliver superior price, performance, and business-enabling capabilities. Now, some additional resources you may want to access include white papers on how to best implement tape storage solutions in your particular environment, as well as a free trial of our new LTFS Library Edition software. Back to you, Amy.
Great. Now we will move on to the question and answer portion of our event. As a reminder, to submit a question, use the Q&A widget at the bottom of your screen.
We've seen a lot of questions come in already, so I'm just going to get started here. You mentioned that the T10000 drives are supported by LTFS Library Edition. Is this accurate? I thought LTFS was only supported by LTO.
This is Jim. I'll take that one. That's a very good question. This is a common misunderstanding currently in the tape industry. LTFS is actually a specification that can be supported by any drive type that supports the basic partitioning capability on a cartridge. With that, both the T10000 tape drives and the LTO tape drives support partitioning and have supported LTFS capability for a couple of years now.
Okay. Thanks, Jim. Let's see. We have another LTFS question here. What tape libraries does the LTFS software support?
Yes. The LTFS Library Edition software from Oracle will support the SL8500 and the SL3000 tape libraries. Certainly, customers can deploy that with new libraries, but they also have an opportunity to take an existing library and with the partitioning capability of that library, cut off a small area to deploy the LTFS with either the T10000 drives or the LTO drives without investing any additional hardware.
Great. Thank you. Let's see. Does Oracle offer an open source LTFS solution?
Yes. It's called Oracle's StorageTek LTFS Open Edition. That software supports LTFS on a single desktop or rack mount drive on the T10000 platform or the LTO platform. This product's been open source for a couple of years now. It was recently enhanced to support both the LTO-6 and the T10000D tape drives. The library edition takes that value prop at the drive level and moves that up to the entire tape library which is the incremental value of the library edition level.
Okay, great. Let's see here. Is there a data threshold where it makes more sense to invest in T10000D instead of LTO?
Good question for the tape drives. A simple guideline is that if you're looking at anything more than a petabyte, that's a very good fit for the enterprise drives. The T10000D will offer lower cost than the enterprise performance and reliability advantages that you need. The savings really become meaningful versus what you might have with an LTO. If you're only looking at a couple hundred terabytes or you're looking at desktop or small rack mounts or just very small entry-level libraries, LTO is a very good mid-range fit for that market, we do offer the SL150 and other products that fill that space.
Okay. Related question there. Will Oracle continue to offer LTO-6 in your libraries?
Yes. We continue to offer LTO-6. Oracle StorageTek started offering LTO with the generation one. They support all five versions. With LTO-6, we support the capability from both IBM and HP, and we certainly plan to continue that support as we move forward in time.
Okay. Thank you. Let's see here. How much more should I expect to pay for this enterprise-class tape drive?
Very good question. This all comes down to TCO type conversations. The overall T10000D is priced so the total acquisition cost is less than an LTO-6 solution. When we say total acquisition cost, as Tom went over in detail, what you can do with T10000, you can buy fewer drives, you can buy fewer cartridges, you can have a smaller library and meet the same capacity and throughput targets. What you get, all the incremental capabilities associated with enterprise tape drives, the higher reliability, higher capabilities, and you can derive that at a lower cost than a comparable LTO solution when you look at all the parts included.
Okay. Here's a specific question for you guys. Is the 16 Gb Fibre Channel interface also compatible with the 8 Gb and 4 Gb environments?
Certainly a good question. That comes up often as you start talking about new capabilities for interfaces. The 16 Gb, similar to the earlier generations, will negotiate down to support 8 Gb and 4 Gb environments. For those customers that have those 4 Gb Fibre Channel, 8 Gb Fibre Channel networks already in place, the T10000D drive will recognize that and automatically negotiate down to the best speed for that particular customer environment.
Okay. I think we have room for one more question here. Let's see. What is the maximum throughput of the T10000D?
As we mentioned, the native throughput of uncompressed data is 252 Mbps. Utilizing the higher 16 Gb Fibre Channel interface, with compressed data, we can push up to 800 Mbps, which is about 2.8 TB per hour. At the library level, you can scale that by the number of drives you have back there. That can scale up to hundreds of terabytes per hour capability with our library systems.
Okay, great. I think that's all the time we have for questions today. If you did submit a question that we did not answer, we'll get back to you via email. Thank you to our audience for joining us today. A replay of today's presentation will be posted in the next few days in an email.