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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the as-opposed-to-non-linear-tape? dept.

The Linear Tape-Open market is stable:

The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs)—Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Quantum—today released their annual tape media shipment report, detailing quarterly and year-over-year shipments.

The report shows a record 96,000 petabytes (PB) of total compressed tape capacity shipped in 2016, an increase of 26.1 percent over the previous year. Greater LTO-7 tape technology density as well as the continuous growth in LTO-6 tape technology shipments were key contributors to this increase.

[...] While the total compressed tape capacity grew dramatically in 2016, the total volume of tape cartridges shipped in 2016 remained flat over the previous year whereas hard disk drives (HDD) saw a decrease in unit sales of approximately 9.5 percent year-over-year2. This stability in tape cartridge shipments indicates that customers continue to rely on low-cost, high-density tape as part of their current data protection and retention strategies and evolving tape technologies are becoming attractive to new areas of the market.

"Compressed tape capacity" is a nonsense number that multiplies the "raw" capacity by a compression ratio. Assuming that only LTO-6 and LTO-7 tapes were sold (which have a 2.5:1 compression ratio rather than the 2:1 of earlier generations), then 38,400 PB or 38.4 exabytes were shipped.

LTO-6 tapes store 2.5 TB and LTO-7 tapes store 6 TB. Planned LTO-8 tapes will store 12.8 TB, LTO-9 will store 26 TB, and LTO-10 will store 48 TB. The max uncompressed speed of these generations will be 160, 300, 427, 708, and 1100 MB/s respectively.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:28PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:28PM (#496564)

    Well, look at NAS vendors, if you got the cash they'll build anything that can be imagined, even build things that shouldn't be imagined.

    Without the size constraint of drives, you could put thousands of cards in something the size of a dorm fridge. In fact I wouldn't even use cards and slots I'd just solder a couple flash chips to a FPGA and connect the FPGAs in some peculiar manner and write software to route around failing chips, or go board level replacement.

    Its an interesting thought experiment to manufacture a device that stores a petabyte. Thats only 4000 cards, so 40 cards holding 10 x 10 array. With multilayer boards and BGA packaging I bet that each card would be bigger than a business card but smaller than a postcard. A couple dozen could fit in a shoebox?

    For offsite backup each card would hold 25 TB which is 10 LTO-6 tapes. Each card would cost about $10K maybe. Of course you could reuse it and the speed of writing would be limited almost solely to what you could plug it into, imagine writing to 64 cards in parallel with plenty of parity-recovery bits because you got 100 chips on board.

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