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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 Grishnakh on Wednesday April 19 2017, @08:46PM (6 children)
Um, this really doesn't make sense. There *are* no cheaper backup solutions, in $/GB, than LTO tape that I'm aware of. You can get portable hard drives pretty cheaply these days with multi-TB capacities, but they're still more expensive per TB than LTO cartridges. You're right that hard-drive based online backups have massive advantages in being able to do continuous snapshots and being able to easily access those backups at any time, but it comes at a cost. If you're backing up really massive amounts of data, requiring hundreds or thousands of cartridges, LTO is the cheapest way to do it; the expense of the drive is a one-time cost, so unless you're only backing up a handful of tapes worth of data, that cost becomes insignificant. So a small business probably has no business bothering with tape, but larger organizations can do backups far more cheaply that way.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:04PM (2 children)
Um, this really doesn't make sense. There *are* no cheaper backup solutions, in $/GB, than LTO tape that I'm aware of. You can get portable hard drives pretty cheaply these days with multi-TB capacities, but they're still more expensive per TB than LTO cartridges.
I think that the point was that LTO tape is only cheaper per gigabyte if the tape drives are free, which they are not [newegg.com], and one tape is drive is needed at any site where any backup, verfication, or restore can take place.
Every hard drive includes not only its magnetic medium, but also the drive needed to read and write that medium anywhere it might be located. Not so with an LTO cartridge.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:10AM
Right, so if you're backing up hundreds of tapes' worth of data, the cost of that drive isn't very significant any more. If you're only backing up a couple tapes' worth, then it definitely is.
(Score: 1) by fyngyrz on Sunday April 23 2017, @07:48PM
The only way you'd get me to use tape backups is if (a) the drives were not expensive, (b) tapes were not expensive, (c) the drive was an awesome reel-to-reel thing that made my office look like a 20th century mad scientist's lair. (c2) I can haz blinkenlights too? (c3) I can haz Switches?
Otherwise, it's multi-terabyte drives for me. Immediate random-read-access is just the cherry on top.
I'm not a fan of video and not handling very large amounts of data, so the choice remains open to me.
Also... just referring back a few posts... seems like there's no actual need for tape drives to be that fast on write, as one could multi-stage the backup through fast temp storage. Get it off the system to a fast drive, then back up that drive to tape at something less than ludicrous speed, no?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:14AM (1 child)
If you're backing up really massive amounts of data, requiring hundreds or thousands of cartridges, LTO is the cheapest way to do it [...]
The previous poster seemed to be describing a place where a single hard drive could hold te whole of their data. Hard drives are now available with 12 TB uncompressed capacity; that ought to be enough for some.
https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-he12 [hgst.com]
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:36AM
Tape has use cases.
But how many people are using hundreds of tapes? Not that many compared to how many people can back up everything to a handful of them.
For every massive company with hundreds of terabytes of vital data, there are hundreds of companies with only terabytes of vital data. Probably that same company's lawyers, accountants, architects, HR outsourcers, etc. etc. etc.
(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