Petabyte tapes are on the horizon - but dont hold your breath

Date:
Wed, 07 Sep 2022 21:58:30 +0000

Description:
Group behind LTO announces update to roadmap but doesnt give any timeline.

FULL STORY ======================================================================

The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) consortium, together with some of the biggest
names in tape storage (HPE, IBM and Quantum) have updated the LTO Ultrium roadmap.

After a five-year gestation, the group has added a 13th and a 14th
generation, reaching 288TB and 576TB uncompressed respectively (controversially, the tape industry usually adds 150% capacity to produce a second up-to compressed storage).

As such, the compressed capacity of a Gen13 tape is expected to reach 720TB and that of a Gen14 number, a gargantuan 1.44PB. In comparison, the biggest hard disk drive currently stands at 22TB with 100TB the largest SSD capacity
. Tape to face some serious headwinds?

The first LTO tape appeared 22 years ago and had a 200GB compressed capacity; the latest LTO-9 tape improved this number by 225 times (45TB) and shows no sign of slowing down.

Or does it? The transition from LTO-8 to LTO-9 was a complicated one due to legal and technological reasons, and rather than doubling in capacity, the consortium decided unilaterally back in 2020 to increase the capacity by 50%.

Given the two-to-three-year gap between the mass availability of the newest generation of LTO tapes, with LTO-9 being the latest, LTO-14 may well be up
to 15 years away from now, assuming the consortium doesnt decide to reset the timeline once again.

By 2037, other technologies ( DNA , Holographic , Optical , Glass ) may have matured and evolved to become a much bigger threat to the venerable tape.
Last year, we reported that LTO-10 was supposed to land sooner rather than later - but were still waiting. Read More

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One thing that the announcement didnt mention is the transfer rate, which currently stands at 0.75GBps for LTO-8 and 1GBps for LTO-9 (both compressed). A 33% generational improvement would bring the transfer rate for LTO-14 to about 4GBps which may be highly problematic both for archiving and retrieval given the storage capacity being considered.

As for pricing, LTO-9 tapes sell for around $8 per TB, with LTO-8 tapes being cheapest at $4.50 cents per TB and LTO-7 ones hitting $6.30. One can expect prices to drop significantly by the time LTO-14 finally hits the market with sub-$1 being a quasi-certainty. Readers are likely to still be expensive; the OWC Mercury Pro LTO-9 tape drive we reviewed in February 2022, sold for more than $6,000.

With that said, tape has its place in the tiered storage hierarchy: be it in cold storage (either for cloud backup or cloud storage ), as a data loss protection tool to combat ransomware via air-gapping and as a regulatory compliance mechanism (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA) via its WORM (Write Once, Read Many) feature. Looking for better backups? Check out the best cloud storage around



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/petabyte-tapes-are-on-the-horizon-but-dont-hold -your-breath/


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