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posted by martyb on Thursday October 26 2017, @09:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-to-use-at-home? dept.

The Linear Tape-Open standard will be extended by another two generations, increasing raw/uncompressed capacity from LTO-8's 12 TB to 192 TB on an LTO-12 tape:

The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Quantum, announced the specifications of the latest LTO Ultrium format, generation 8, which is now available for licensing by media manufacturers.

The LTO Program also released a new LTO technology roadmap, detailing specifications up to twelve (12) generations of tape technology, extending the total capacity of data held on one LTO Ultrium generation 12 tape cartridge to 480TB – an increase of 32 times the capacity of current-generation 7 cartridges.

The new LTO generation 8 specifications are designed to double the tape cartridge capacity from the previous LTO generation 7, with customers now being able to store up to 30TB per cartridge when compressed. In an effort to push the innovation boundaries of tape technology going forward, the current LTO format required a recording technology transition that supports capacity growth for future LTO generations. To address this technological shift and maintain affordability in times of extreme data growth, the latest LTO generation 8 specifications are intended to be only backwards compatible with LTO generation 7 cartridges.

Despite records like 220-330 TB uncompressed in the laboratory, these 100+ TB capacities won't be available for a while:

[Spectra Logic's] CEO and founder, Nathan Thompson, said: "Spectra foresees the availability of LTO-9 at 24TB per tape cartridge in two years; LTO-10 at 48TB in four years; LTO-11 at 96TB in six or seven years; and LTO-12 at 190+TB in eight to nine years. I firmly believe that no other commercial data storage technology available now or on the horizon, will keep pace with or fulfill the world's increasing demand for cost-effective, long-term data storage like tape technology."

Also at IT Jungle.

Previously: IBM and FUJIFILM Create Equivalent of 220 TB Tape Cartridge
LTO Tape Sales Remain Steady
IBM Claims Densest Tape Storage Record (330 TB)


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday October 27 2017, @09:26AM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday October 27 2017, @09:26AM (#588170) Journal

    The problem with tape for the last decade or so has been the high barrier to entry. When I first looked at tape about 20 years ago, the cost of the tape drive was about the same as the cost of a hard drive of the same capacity as one tape and tapes were about a tenth of that cost. The drives were only about £100-150, so it was a fairly small addition to a £1000+ PC. Now, an LTO-5 (1.5TB) drive costs around £1,200: more than a 2TB SSD and a lot more than 10TB of hard disk storage. The tapes are only about £20, but I'd need 10 of them to back up a NAS that cost me under £500 to build.

    The disparity between the media and drive cost only makes sense when you're buying a lot of media. Hard disks cost about £30/TB, LTO-5 tapes cost about half that, but with a £1,200 drive I need to save £1,200 on the cost of the media before I hit the break-even point. LTO6 seems to work out at about £10/TB, and I didn't see LTO-7 or -8 on sale, so let's be niec to tape and go with the LTO-6 tape price but the LTO-5 drive price. That gives us a saving of £20/TB with tape media, so I'd need 60TB before I reached the break even point. Unfortunately, by the time I get to 60TB, those 3.5TB tapes start to feel a bit cramped for a single drive, so I need an even more expensive tape library. If I have anything close to 60TB that I need to archive, I start to get really worried about restore times, and the thought of having to restore from 15-20 tapes sequentially doesn't make me too happy.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @05:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @05:19PM (#588317)

    This thing is aimed at Business grade pockets, people whose data is more valuable than the TCO of LTO backup, For family pictures, we have to stick to hard drives option. It would be great to have LTO for home use but even old generation drives are over a thousand. Do they are that expensive to make? or are just high priced to milk "enterprise"?

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday October 29 2017, @11:25AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Sunday October 29 2017, @11:25AM (#589002) Journal
      The problem is that for enterprises it's cheaper to have an off-site RAID array with snapshotting and a bunch of removable disks. You do live backups of snapshots from your production system every few hours to the spare, and then you send rotate multiple copies to the backup disks that you then store in a third site. If your primary site goes down, you can switch to the spare instantly, use it, and pull in the external disks to restore your primary, then snapshot and migrate any changes over from the backup, then return to your normal backup schedule. In contrast, with tapes you're down until you've done a complete restore (which, as the last place I worked at that used tapes discovered, can take a really, really long time).
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