XenData will introduce three V3 archive appliances at IBC2026 that make LTO tape libraries available simultaneously through file-system and S3 object interfaces. A file's path and name become the corresponding object's key, allowing legacy media applications and newer object-based workflows to share the same archive.
The X20 V3 supports up to two LTO SAS drives and includes a 20TB HDD fast tier. The X25-S V3 supports up to four SAS drives with a 12TB SSD tier. The larger X50 V3 supports as many as eight SAS or Fibre Channel LTO drives and offers 64TB or 144TB of HDD RAID cache.
Write caching and intelligent pre-fetching are important because tape has high streaming throughput but slow random access. A fast tier can absorb incoming jobs and stage likely reads while the archive retains the cost and offline characteristics of LTO for long-term preservation.
XenData says the systems support LTO-10 and earlier libraries from several major vendors and can scale to tens of petabytes. The announcement does not provide S3 API coverage, sustained benchmark results, high-availability design or pricing, which are necessary for comparison with cloud object archives and other on-premises tape gateways.
