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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.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:14AM (1 child)
If you're backing up really massive amounts of data, requiring hundreds or thousands of cartridges, LTO is the cheapest way to do it [...]
The previous poster seemed to be describing a place where a single hard drive could hold te whole of their data. Hard drives are now available with 12 TB uncompressed capacity; that ought to be enough for some.
https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-he12 [hgst.com]
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:36AM
Tape has use cases.
But how many people are using hundreds of tapes? Not that many compared to how many people can back up everything to a handful of them.
For every massive company with hundreds of terabytes of vital data, there are hundreds of companies with only terabytes of vital data. Probably that same company's lawyers, accountants, architects, HR outsourcers, etc. etc. etc.