The legendary tape storage is still very much alive: this is why more and more LTO cartridges are being sold

In a world dominated by a wide variety of traditional hard drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs), we might think that the tape storage It’s part of the past. Nothing further from reality. This type of magnetic support is still very much alive, so much so that it is experiencing significant growth.

When we talk about tape storage today we are referring to the evolution of that technology that emerged in the 1950s. Specifically, to LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tapes that have been marketed since the beginning of this century and that among their advantages It highlights the low cost per terabyte and its durability of up to 30 years.

Companies are buying more LTO cartridges

The latest report from the LTO Consortiuma group made up of HP, IBM and Quantum, notes that year-over-year shipments of tape storage through the fourth quarter of 2023 reached a record of 152.9 exabytes (EB) compressed capacity. This is a growth of 3.14% compared to the same period of the previous year.

Projections suggest that this technology is in good market health and will continue to grow next year. But what is the reason for this trend? According to the aforementioned group, LTO cartridge shipments are being driven by enormous data generation, and the need to store it over time.

This type of cartridge has not been designed for the consumer market, but for the business sector that for various reasons needs to preserve huge amounts of data. LTO Consortium explains that LTO cartridges are a good option for storing unstructured data in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

HPE LTO-9 Ultrium RW 45 TB cartridges cost around 100 euros

It is also a great alternative for large-scale backups. Tape storage is certainly not an ideal choice for data centers where you need to access information quickly, but there are plenty of other use cases where it is virtually unrivaled.

As we say, one of them is backup copies. Microsoft, for example, has tens of thousands of LTO cartridges that are part of your security scheme of Azure, the cloud computing platform. Google also owns a huge amount of tapes to keep your services data safe.

Companies also turn to rendezvous storage for secure data transportation, regulatory compliance, and protection against cyberattacks. If a system is compromised, for example, by a ransomware attack, data stored on cartridges disconnected from the network can be kept safe.

Images | Magstor | Christina

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