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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 TheRaven on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:18AM
I did the maths in a previous story about tapes, so I can't be bothered to do it again now, but the conclusion was that, eventually as your storage size increases, LTO converges on being the cheapest technology. Tape has much higher fixed costs, but lower per-GB costs than other technologies. I think last time I worked it out, the break-even point for tapes vs hard disks was 100TB of backup, which is a lot more than many SMEs need. The problem for tape is that this number was about 10TB when I did the same calculation a couple of years earlier. The amount of data that most businesses have is growing a lot more slowly than the rate at which the break-even point for tape is receding[1], so the potential market is also shrinking. This pushes up the price of the drives, because each new generation needs its R&D costs amortised over fewer sales (and costs more to for the R&D in total, because tape stopped being easy decades ago), which pushes the break-even point even further out. It won't be long before the break-even point is so high that there aren't enough people left to cover the R&D costs for the new tape.
[1] This is also a problem for Oracle. 20-30 years ago, any company with more than a couple of dozen employees needed a high-end database server to manage all of their internal payroll, HR, and so on data. Now, a similar company might have 100 times as much data per employee, but a cheap commodity PC running Postgres (or even MS SQL Server) will happily handle it, so the market for people who need Oracle keeps shrinking.
sudo mod me up