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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:38PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:32AM (1 child)

    by ledow (5567) on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:32AM (#496736) Homepage

    A single 6TB tape at the speeds of the tape drive I found (which states 576 GBph uncompressed transfer rate)?

    That's 12 hours.

    If you're talking autoloaders, you could be down for DAYS.

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  • (Score: 1) by Roger Murdock on Friday April 21 2017, @03:30AM

    by Roger Murdock (4897) on Friday April 21 2017, @03:30AM (#497208)

    Fair enough, I'm imagining that having to recover 6+ TB of data probably means there was a pretty significant storage failure though which might render snapshots/checkpoints moot. We use disk backups, volume shadow copy etc for ease of restore for "I lost my word document" moments which is probably 90% + of restores but anything older than a month or two comes from tape. Anything that requires a restore from off-site media involving multiple tapes probably also involves new hardware, which is a much bigger bottleneck than tape speed.