
How fast?
16TB/hour is 4.5GB/sec. Over what network? To slow SATA drives? Seriously?
Quantum has introduced its second-largest deduplicating hard-drive array the DXi6800, and refreshed its top-end tape library. First, disks: the firm's dedupe gear runs from the low-end DXi V1000 through the 4000 and 6700 and up to the high-end 8500. The 6800 fits between the 6700 and 8500 models. Its capacity ranges from 13TB …
I've not looked up the specific device, but these sort of VTLs tend to have multiple Gige/10Gige/Fibrechannel connections, I don't see a problem in thinking that they can easily handle this sort of bandwidth. The back end disks should be ok as SAATA because they'll be fairly widely striped to aggregate bandwidth.
Assume a fully pegged 10gig network interface usable capacity is ~2.8TB/hour (1000MB/sec * 3600sec * 80% usable). So to hit a rate of 16.3 TB/hr means it would need to support a sustained injest rate of 5.6x 10gig ethernet interfaces fully consumed.
If they can actually get anywhere near that for non perfectly designed benchmarketing workloads color me surprised... as I'm guessing that it's simply another storage vendor magical stat.
While I am sure the Quantum tape library is more dense that the competing options, will it still be around in 5 years or even 10 years. A TS3500 purchased 10 years ago (as a 3584 as it was back then) could have gone through several tape drive technology changes, would still be fully warranted from IBM for a maintenance contract and could still be upgrade and have more frames different drives etc. added to it all in incremental stages as the budget allowed.