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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 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?