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Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out?
storagedude writes: With LTO media sales down by 50% in the last six years, is the end near for tape? With such a large installed base, it may not be imminent, but the time is coming when vendors will find it increasingly difficult to justify continued investment in tape technology, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum.
"If multiple vendors invest in a technology, it has a good chance of winning over the long haul," writes Newman, a long-time proponent of tape technology. "If multiple vendors have a technology they're not investing in, it will eventually lose over time. Of course, over time market requirements can change. It is these interactions that I fear that are playing out in the tape market."
"If multiple vendors invest in a technology, it has a good chance of winning over the long haul," writes Newman, a long-time proponent of tape technology. "If multiple vendors have a technology they're not investing in, it will eventually lose over time. Of course, over time market requirements can change. It is these interactions that I fear that are playing out in the tape market."
Magtape is the only viable medium for things which are actually "backups" as that term is understood in the professional IT arena. Every other possible medium for backups has faults which cripple it for one or more of the requirements which backups are required to fulfill -- primarily that's length of storage, but there are lot of other fun failure modes.
Sure, spinning magnetic storage, optical media, and flash drives each have some advantages for specific purposes.
But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you.
And if you think that's an overly strict requirement, a) you're probably wrong, and b) I can come up with lots more that you won't.
My commercial backup guidelines are these:
You need it backed up on at least 4 pieces of media, of at least 3 different types, in at least 2 different cities, in at least 1 different state; bumping each of those numbers up by 1 is not unreasonable.
Only one backup can be on optical media; only one can be on spinning magnetic media, whether it's powered or not (this includes the cloud, and local external HDD backups, whether powered 24/7, alternating, or pulled and shelved).
Flash media is right out, as are SSDs.
I can pull 20 year old DC3000 tapes off my shelf and read them -- as long as I have a SCSI interface for the computer in question.
GNU tar is great that way.
LTO-9 goes to 25TB/cart, LTO-10 goes to 48TB.
Already announced.
And wouldn't it be interesting to know if that study was based on cartridge count or capacity?
Of *course* the cart count is going down, not *everyone's* data storage needs expand without bounds, and newer larger sizes imply some catch-up.
Tape is great for archive purposes. It would be a shame if LTO dies.
The biggest threat to LTO is the lack of vendors developing drives. At this time only very few companies do R&D for tape devices. IBM, HP and Oracle are the only serious players.
Oracle develops only Enterprise class drives (T10K), not LTO. The market for those drives is quite small, which means the R&D cost needs to be recovered from a relatively low volume. That makes them bl**dy expensive.
HP develops LTO. They have to do R&D for LTO only, as they have no enterprise class drives. LTO is considered commodity so margins are too low to spend a lot on R&D. They will therefor struggle to be cost effective.
IBM develops both an enterprise class (Jaguar) and LTO tape drives. From a tech perspective, IBM are in the best position, as they can develop new technology for their enterprise drives, recoup cost in that segment, and then commoditize the technology in their LTO drives. Unfortunately IBM no longer wants to be a hardware company.
This does not bode well for tape technology in general. I've made a good living from it writing software for tape drives, but I guess all good things come to an end.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB