LTO-5 has now been announced for the IBM tape range... well, the TS3100, TS3200, and TS3500 anyway. If you want LTO-5 for the TS3310 unfortunately you'll have to wait a little bit longer.

A quick technical summary, LTO-5 has a native data transfer of up to 140 MB/sec. and a 1.5 TB Data Cartridge uncompressed, or up to 3TB with the drive's 2:1 compression. It also continues to follow the LTO standard of writing back one generation and reading back two, ensuring that your LTO-3 and LTO-4 tapes still have some life in them. Finally  the drive also has a 8-Gbps Fibre Channel dual-ported interface on the back end, so you can finally have a more resilient connection through to the drive itself when connected to a SAN.

Unlike LTO-4, the half-height LTO-5 drives are available from release, and while I can't find much to confirm this at the moment it seems that unlike LTO-4 they have the same throughput speeds. It is however stressed that the half-height is designed for "low and medium workloads", which means to me that they've either been fudging the performance figures on the smaller drives, or they're as physically reliable and robust as a party leader's campaign pledge.

But is all this news? LTO has had a new generation released regularly every 2-3 years since the year 2000, doubling capacity each time. Recently generations 7 and 8 have also been added to the roadmap, so we can probably expect 6.4Tb and 12.8TB volumes with a 2.5:1 compression and 315MB and 472MBps throughputs around 2015 and 2018 respectively. So far the boffins have been true to form and on schedule for the previous generations, so these are probably fairly achievable targets.

What I suspect is more newsworthy however, is that this release is just in time for TSM 6.2 upgrades. With IBM now looking to push people from TSM 5.5 this is probably a good time to look at a full backup refresh, replacing and migrating the entire backend TSM infrastructure with TSM 6.2 combined with LTO-5 and a higher spec server to run it all.