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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 frojack on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:42AM (1 child)
Write speed can be really fast on tape.
Read can take forever.
Back in the late 90s we were backing up to LT? tapes, and had tons of tapes that we cycled religiously.
Too small of an operation to have a tape-arm. Just a large fireproof safe in another room.
Numbered slots. Numbered tapes, with digitally numbered headers.
We virtually never retrieved anything from the tapes. No need.
But any time we did is was a Chinese fire-drill.
It was usually from the most recent tape, and that mostly worked.
The few times we had to really reach back to old tapes they couldn't be read.
Or they had so many errors it they had to be babysat just to find the files.
We finally went through the tapes and read checked every on of them and found out any tape older than 18 months had a 50-50 chance of a read error. (And don't get me started on tape drive longevity or interchangeability!)
Tape sucks.
In the best of installations tape sucks.
In the minimalist installations tape sucks.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:05PM
On whichever medium, data needs to be kept fresh. No exceptions, only variations to the theme. Here is how google does it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM [youtube.com]