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LTO Tape Sales Remain Steady

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

takyon writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:58AM (1 child)

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:58AM (#496763)
    You still need to be able to catalog and remove them for offsite storage. With that many SD cards I'd trust an automated system over a human to do that work. Plus watching the tech stand there as little plastic eggs fall out a dispenser shoot would be priceless.
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday April 23 2017, @01:31PM

    by VLM (445) on Sunday April 23 2017, @01:31PM (#498318)

    Presumably there's some ISO/DIN standard for safe deposit box sizes and you'd likely get something that size like an 80s home computer or video game cartridge except this just a bit smaller than a safe deposit box contains hundreds, thousands, maybe 10s of thousands of the flash chips.

    You'd buy your backup devices to fit your rotation plans.

    I would not be surprised to see a standard size picked as per above and depending on how many TB you need, the box contains somewhere between a couple and hundreds of flash chips.