Project Description
Tape as a storage medium has many benefits: it is reliable, portable, low-cost, low-power, and high-capacity (an LTO-5 cartridge, available next year, will hold 1.5TB uncompressed). However, tape is not particularly user-friendly or easy to use, it has no standard format, and data often cannot be used without first copying it to disk. LTFS, which will work on LTO Gen. 5 (and above) and Jaguar (3592) implements a true file system for tape. That is, you put a tape cartridge in a drive and it shows up on your desktop like a removing disk or USB drive. You can drag-and-drop files to or from the tape, and double-click files to open them in their associated application. Files can even be updated on tape. This capability allows tape to be a first-class storage citizen in file-based work flows. LTFS also supports library automation, including the ability to find data on a tape in a library without mounting and searching tape volumes. LTFS will initially be available for Linux and Mac OS X, with the ability to mount LTFS tapes on Windows from either platform using CIFS.; a native Windows implementation will follow as quickly as possible.
Selected Patents
- ARC820090046: A. Amir, W. Imaino, D. Pease, R. Richter. A Primary Storage Media with an Associated Secondary Media for Efficient Data Management
- ARC820090046: A. Amir, D. Pease, R. Richter. Efficient File Index and Metadata Storage and File System Management of Magnetic Tape Utilizing An additional Index Partition
People
- David Pease
- Lucas Villas-Real
- Arnon Amir
- Michael Richmond
- Brian Biskeborn
