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)
Related Stories
IBM and FUJIFILM have demonstrated the equivalent of an LTO magnetic tape cartridge with a capacity of 220 terabytes.
To achieve 123 billion bits per square inch, IBM researchers developed several new technologies, including:
- A set of advanced servo control technologies that include a high bandwidth head actuator, a servo pattern and servo channel and a set of tape speed optimized H-infinity track follow controllers that together enable head positioning with an accuracy better than 6 nanometers. This enables a track density of 181,300 tracks per inch, a more than 39 fold increase over LTO6.
- An enhanced write field head technology that enables the use of much finer barium ferrite (BaFe) particles.
- Innovative signal-processing algorithms for the data channel, based on noise-predictive detection principles, enable reliable operation with an ultra narrow 90nm wide giant magnetoresistive (GMR) reader.
Rumors of tape's death are greatly exaggerated; LTO-6 tape pricing has fallen to $0.02 per GB, and a record 6.6 exabytes of tape were shipped in Q3 2014. The LTO roadmap calls for 48 terabyte LTO-10 tapes at some point in the future. Each new generation of LTO roughly doubles capacity, so a 200 TB LTO-12 tape may be slated for 2030.
In April 2014, Sony announced the development of 148 Gb/in2 tape that could enable a 185 TB tape cartridge. A month later, IBM and FUJIFILM announced that they had achieved the equivalent of an 85.9 Gb/in2, 154 TB tape. The new tape is based on the same NANOCUBIC™ technology.
Edit: Changed to reflect a tape cost of $8/TB compressed, $20/TB uncompressed.
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.
IBM has claimed its fifth-in-succession world tape density record with a 330TB raw capacity technology using Sony tape media tech.
Back in April, 2015 IBM and Fujitsu demonstrated a 123 billion bits/in2 220TB tape using so-called Nanocubic technology and barium ferrite tape media.
This time around, IBM's tape drive researchers are working with Sony Storage Media Solutions and its sputtered media. Engineering developments have enabled an areal density of 201Gb/in2.
Their technology includes:
- New signal-processing algorithms for the data channel, based on noise-predictive detection principles, enabling reliable operation at a linear density of 818,000 bits per inch with an ultra-narrow 48nm-wide tunnelling magneto-resistive (TMR) reader.
- A set of combined advanced servo control technologies that enable head positioning with an accuracy of better than 7 nanometres.
- Use of a 48nm-wide TMR hard disk drive read head, which enables a track density of 246,200 tracks per inch, a 13-fold increase over the TS1155 tape drive.
- New low-friction tape head technology that permits use of very smooth tape media.
IBM and Sony have developed magnetic tape that can store 201 gigabits per square inch, enabling the creation of a 330 TB (uncompressed) tape cartridge:
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @10:04PM (12 children)
And no guarantee you can find/repair/operate a deck in 10-20 years if you need the backup as anything better than a current-generation live backup.
While they are slow and require swapping media more often, optical discs/drives will still be a better option for long term recovery, given stable compositions. I've had organic dye disks last me upwards of 20 years (yes I have some from the 90s with errors still within the 2312(?) byte error correction for a system-readable 2048 byte block.) And since the drives have continued supporting old media each generation, rather than changing the whole whole supported format almost every generation, with only 1 or a few generations of deprecated formats 'maybe supported' (go ask all those people who have had problems recovering tapes on newer LTO drives or models other than the original they recorded them with) you'd be a fool to rely on LTO tapes for anything other than recent backups for recovery after a catastrophic hardware failure or hacking attempt. And the latter is risky with tape since they can be rewritten, whereas WORM media is nominally immutable (excluding some new 'secure erase' features in DVD/Bluray drivers that can trigger all the dye bits so the disk is like one bit row of 0s or 1s.)
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Thursday October 26 2017, @10:50PM (2 children)
I put the UNCOMPRESSED capacities in the headline.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @03:13AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday October 27 2017, @12:01PM
I think the AC is just depressed.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday October 27 2017, @08:16AM (6 children)
A quick search shows LTO-1 tapes still being made. LTO-2 drives (which will read LTO-1 tapes) are still being made. So that's 17 years so far (the tech was only released in 2000, so it can't go back 20 years yet).
That's fairly typical of tape. You can still buy a DDS2 drive as well if you have any tapes from the mid '90s. Looks like you can still get a QIC-80 drive as well.
But really, if the data still matters, you should be reading it out and (after verifying it), writing it to new media every few years.
LTO-7 has a raw capacity of 6TB. That's an assload of Blueray disks. LTO does offer WORM as well.
CD,DVD, and Blueray have the same guarantee that LTO does. No actual iron-clad commitments but a considerable demand makes continuation profitable.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 27 2017, @05:55PM (5 children)
OK, but....
Around 1984 I needed to read some 800 bpi even parity tapes, that were the standard in 1960, when they were written, and couldn't find anybody who could read them. Odd parity could still be read, but not even parity. But by the standard (of 1960) even parity was used for BCD (i.e., text) and odd parity was for machine native. And the machines had changed. And it could still be read and converted, even the floating point data, if it was odd parity. The even parity, which is what *should* have been more portable, couldn't be read. So we couldn't recover the raw data (it was 1960 census data, and the census bureau said they hadn't kept it on tape), but only the processed data, which didn't have all the fields, and had massaged some of the fields.
FWIW, I think the problem was that an even parity space couldn't be distinguished from an interrecord gap, but why that was a problem in 1984(est.) and not in the early 1960's I don't know.
My take away is to have multiple copies in different forms of your important data, because you can't predict which ones will become unreadable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday October 27 2017, @07:15PM (4 children)
That may have been a quirk of the particular hardware you had. Even now I see a project to read old 7 track tapes that manages to read even parity. I can't say I ever worked w/ 7track. I did deal with reading 9 track tapes into a PC in the mid '90s, but the format was still in production then.
Really the 7 track should have been copied to 9 track in the late '60s as the sun set on 7 track. Likewise, now is a good time to copy archival data from LTO-1 tapes to LTO-7. On the plus side, they can fit 60 old tapes on one new tape. The old LTO-1 tapes can still be used for ephemeral backups if necessary.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday October 28 2017, @12:41AM (3 children)
I think you have your decades wrong. I know for certain that in the 1960's we didn't have access to 9-track tapes. (Well, actually I know this for the 1970's. In the 1960's I was still in college, and writing to tape was NOT one of the things covered in the computer classes I took. I had to learn that on the job, later.)
That said, I'll agree that the data should have been more carefully preserved, and we discovered that when the mid 1980s rolled around. But we were on a limited budget, computer time was quite expensive, and the original data was supposed to be being kept by someone else anyway.
But IIRC 9-track tapes didn't come in until the IBM-360, which we didn't have access to, but it was well into the 1970's. We did our tape handling on time rented on a 1401 system that we accessed by courier, and they didn't have 9-track tapes. I think they retired the system before switching to 9-track tapes. (They did eventually get a 360/30 for tape handling, but I'm pretty sure that was a lot later.) I think we only used 9-track tapes for 3 years or less before the push started to convert to 6250 bpi tapes...with two different data centers with incompatible formats (even though they both used CDC machines).
But I hadn't graduated from college at the time you say we should have switched to 9-track, and there was no way we could have even attempted to do so when I first went to work.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 28 2017, @02:23AM (2 children)
The System/360 came out in 1964 and it had 9 track tape. The 370 came out in the early '70s. They included the 6250 bpi 9 track tape units It may well be that you didn't have access to one of those, they weren't cheap and a lot of people didn't but they weren't the only machines that could access a 9 track (of any density).
Of course, no computer gear was actually cheap in the early '70s.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday October 28 2017, @05:10AM (1 child)
Yes. That's probably the way it was. But without access to a 9-Track drive the claim that we should convert our programs to use them is...unreasonable.
There is, of course, the additional problem that we were using a custom system that only worked on the IBM 7094... That, however, shouldn't affect the Census Bureau, which apparently just didn't have procedures in place to keep computer records updated. *We* didn't have that option, but they should have...but they were concentrating on the next census, and apparently they were still thinking that the paper records were the real data, and even of those they only kept summaries, because it would otherwise have been overwhelming in quantity. So, AFAIK, even now the only records from the 1960 census are processed summaries...because even parity 800bpi tapes were unreadable. (OTOH, that may be where I made a mistake...perhaps the original tapes were 556bpi or 200bpi...but they were even parity.)
But my take-away message still seems correct: If you have important data that you need to keep as an archival record, don't just keep multiple copies, keep it in multiple formats.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 28 2017, @06:19AM
If you didn't have access to the appropriate next generation of storage, you were under-funded for your mission. Archiving isn't a fire and forget activity. That wasn't your fault, but it was a problem. In general, I do agree with you that multiple copies in multiple formats is a good way to maximize the odds of retrieving the data later.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Friday October 27 2017, @09:59PM
LTO is specced for two generations of backwards compatibility on reads, and I have done LTO-2 on LTO-4 hardware, and LTO-4 on LTO-6 hardware. If you need older than that, there's always ebay. LTO is extremely common (by the standards of that sort of high end Enterprise gear) so I am not worried about being able to find working drives a decade from now.
That said, you should always plan on migrating to newer media after a few years. That should just be a party of the standard operations. Once you have a Petavyte on a room full of LTO-4, you can upgrade to an LTO-6, and shrink down your archive to one rack of LTO-6 tapes and make room for all the new LTO-6 tapes you'll make over the next few years. Then, repeat when you migrate everything to a small number of LTO-8's a few years later. If keeping the archive alive isn't a part of the plan, it serves little purpose regardless of what format you store it on.
(Score: 1) by Roger Murdock on Sunday October 29 2017, @11:23PM
You should be writing your data to newer media every few years to avoid exactly that problem, regardless of what media you've chosen. You could have saved yourself a lot of typing there.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Thursday October 26 2017, @11:12PM (1 child)
back in '90 or so, I had some 30 Sun workstations to backup on a single cassette tape. I could not get management to sign off on a better backup solution, so I made my own. Made daily incremental backups that I kept in my cube. Made weekly incremental backups, that I kept off site (e.g. my bookshelf at home). Made monthly full backups that I kept offsite.
Got laid off. About a month later got a call from a co-worker. "Um, we deleted some important stuff. Do you have a backup?". Me, looking at 10-15 tapes in my bookcase, "um, no. Why? Didn't you continue my documented backup strategy after I got laid off?".
She knew I had the tapes, I knew she knew, but she also knew that outside of a warrant they were never gonna see those backups.
Oh, why did I get laid off? Cuz I couldn't keep to a schedule. I was a part time sysadmin, full time developer. When someone's workstation went sideways I was responsible for fixing it, and the time it took was not built into my developer schedule. After a few months I realized this was a system designed to screw me, but didn't have the social/political skills to fix.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @04:03AM
And how to get them to put up torrents of what they backed up 10-30 years on when nobody would be able to prove it was them :)
Wing Commander source code, Star Wars Galaxies Source Code, and a few dozen others have all gotten leaked, some by hackers, but many by disgruntled laid off personnel like yourself. Would be nice to see all those old backups make their way into the distributed historical archives know as the 'cloud' :)
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Thursday October 26 2017, @11:26PM (12 children)
Wait... What?!
(((102*105.4*21.5)/(15*11*1))*400)
If you have money to burn,
546TB worth of Micro SD cards (~1400 * 400GB) would physically fit inside an Ultrium tape.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @11:47PM
Given the choice, I think I might still go for the tape. Who has the time (and multi-socket adapter) to plug/unplug the 1400 uSD cards?
Either way, the station wagon just got a lot bigger!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 27 2017, @12:02AM (8 children)
Some articles in June 2015 talked about a 512 GB MicroSD card from "Microdia" that seems to have been vaporware or a limited release:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/400gb-microsd-card-ultimate-nintendo-switch-storage-device-3276679 [trustedreviews.com] (2017)
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2931567/microdia-introduces-microsd-with-laptop-sized-storage.html [pcworld.com]
It will be interesting to see if the legit NAND manufacturers go from 400 GB to 500/512 GB or skip right to 1 TB. It is entirely possible for them to do so since new 3D NAND generations often double the bit density and everyone seems to be aggressively working on 3D QLC NAND (which is a better fit for SD cards in the first place).
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(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday October 27 2017, @03:28AM (7 children)
I've used LTO tape, and we used the scheme Snotnose mentioned, and we fought LTO for years.
The prospect of 100 TB tapes crapping out with the regularity we experienced with tapes of that day is frightening. Its not just the cost of replacement tape, but the sheer time involved in moving that much data yet again onto a new tape. Sooner or later you reach a size where you simply can't shift that much data and expect to get it done in the time available. (Especially if you have to take something off line to do the backup).
Then there's the schlepping of tapes to off site storage. And back. And the logging, so you know which tapes are which, and where they are. And shitcanning them BEFORE they fail and replacing with new ones. And cleaning the heads, and dealing with mechanism failures and tapes eaten by the machine.
When you add it all up, its easier and cheaper to just BUY more NAS boxes and hang them on some network (somewhere). Until you are talking CIA sized data storage requirements I doubt the cost and bother of tape is ever going to be attractive. Too much discipline for small shops, too big an expense for medium sized shops, and just not big or fast enough for large shops.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Friday October 27 2017, @04:08AM (5 children)
When you add it all up, its easier and cheaper to just BUY more NAS boxes and hang them on some network (somewhere). Until you are talking CIA sized data storage requirements I doubt the cost and bother of tape is ever going to be attractive. Too much discipline for small shops, too big an expense for medium sized shops, and just not big or fast enough for large shops.
Well someone sure seems to be buying them...
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday October 27 2017, @05:05AM (2 children)
LTO Tape Sales Remain Steady [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday October 27 2017, @09:11AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @07:54PM
yeah i bought a 16 tape changer off ebay and tapes and set them to rotate and boom backups. some guy shows up and takes them and i log what ones go. bar code says which tape is in or out.
i am not really sure what the problem is. some people just hate tapes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @06:17AM
People still use Windoze too
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @05:59PM
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday October 27 2017, @06:51AM
I agree with frojack.
Doing backup properly is hard, and when you have a non-trivial amount of physical media you need to keep track of, and cycle correctly, it is amazing how many issues crop up.
One of the interesting issues I had was that the some of the tapes sent to off-site storage would go missing. The operators didn't care: they just grabbed a new blank and wrote out a new incremental/full on the new tape and put it into the system. They had done their job: performed a backup.
The issue only came to light when an 'annual' disaster recovery test was run, and of course, some of the backup tapes were missing. In a live situation, that would have been catastrophic.
Always, always, always check you can restore from your backups. And that means checking the processes to obtain your backup tapes from wherever they have been stored.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 27 2017, @06:11PM (1 child)
I believe we're talking about archival storage. For that flash memory is totally worthless. I believe it will hold data for a month or so without being plugged in to a power source. Perhaps there are more recent designs that will hold it longer, though I wouldn't count on it. But capacitors leak charge. Magnetic domains are the traditional archival storage for multiple reasons. (They aren't the most permanent, that's pits burned into a smooth surface (or cut into it) like the first generation of CDs, or the records sent out into space.) There are other promising technologies that haven't been made practical, like Nitorgen atoms embedded in a diamond crystal, but I believe they're planning on using the orientation of those atoms to store data, so I'd need evidence that they were archival.
Magnetic domains currently hold the best combination of durability, convenience, and manufacturability. Organic dyes on platters are also pretty good. And with both of those when you shrink the domain size you compromise the durability. So you should presume, when there's no other evidence, that a denser storage will be less durable.
If you *aren't* thinking about archival storage, your options are considerably wider. And it should be possible to make that multiple flash-drive huge storage device. I'm presuming that your description wasn't intended to be an actual design for construction, but rather a way of estimating how much it could hold. It might be an excellent intermediate level of storage, but since we mainly switched away from main-frames, few computers have such an intermediate level of storage. (I remember that it used to be quite convenient, but these days we generally use hard disks (or built-in flash drives) to handle that intermediate level. The problem is that we often use those same drives for archival storage, which is a truly terrible approach.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Saturday October 28 2017, @01:12AM
While I absolutely agree with and appreciate your serious comment, I was just being facetious about the saying. Apparently, these days it could be adapted to "[...] a station wagon full of microSDs"
It would be really great to finally see a breakthrough and some medium that could be used for any storage purpose (and is not prone to EMPs or other "accidental" decay).
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday October 27 2017, @09:26AM (2 children)
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.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @05:19PM (1 child)
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
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by SDRefugee on Friday October 27 2017, @05:02PM
I was the backup admin at the last company I worked for, prior to my retirement in 2010. At the time we were using a Dell/Overland tape library with two HP LTO3 drives to back up between 3-4TB. I'd not kept up with LTO tape storage size evolution since I retired. These capacities kinda blows my 67 year old mind...
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..