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76,000PB LTO Compressed Capacity Shipped in 2015

Increase of 17.8% over prior year, but ...

The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM  Corp. and Quantum Corp. released the total industry LTO Ultrium format tape media shipment data, announcing a record 76,000PB (compressed*) of total capacity shipped in 2015, an increase of 17.8% over the prior year.

The milestone, announced in tandem with the launch of a new report showing both 2015 and year-over-year generational data, provides a picture of the long-term viability and importance of tape in today’s rapidly shifting storage environment.

The report also showed more than 385,000PB of total data capacity has been shipped since the introduction of LTO Ultrium cartridges in 2000. A petabyte equals roughly four times the amount of data contained in the Library of Congress. For an understanding of the amount of data shipped to date, multiply the amount of data in the Library of Congress by 385,000, and imagine all of that data stored on tape.

The report shows significant increases in year-over-year total capacity shipped aided by the introduction of LTO-7 products, which were made available to the market during the last quarter of 2015. Shipments in 2015 reflect a small decrease in media unit shipments over the prior year, which is typical as the market anticipates the introduction of a new generation. The year-over-year unit shipments are offset by the total capacity shipped in the same period, indicating that tape usage is migrating to higher capacity LTO-6 and LTO-7 technologies.

Tape continues to serve IT professionals in many industries with low cost, secure and reliable storage – especially for longer term applications,” said Jason Buffington, principle analyst, data protection, ESG. “With LTO-7 technology recently coming onto the market, we’re expecting a continued use case for the technology in many industries, as well as adoption in new industries seeking ways to safely store rapidly increasing data.”

Moving forward, the LTO Program intends to produce tape media reports by generation, sharing relevant data with the marketplace as an indicator of usage by storage professionals across media and entertainment, security, government and other verticals.

*Assuming a 2.5:1 compression achieved with larger compression history buffer available beginning with LTO-6 drives.

Read also:
The LTO Program Media Shipment Report

Comments

The marketing business is able to demonstrate the contrary of the truth. Here is a good example.

When you read this press release, you can think that LTO is a growing and successful activity. It's not.

The only two figures revealed concerned the compress capacity shipped on LTO cartridges: 76,000PB in 2015, up 17.8% Y/Y in 2015, and 385,000PB since the introduction of the technology in 2000.

These figures are probably true as they came from three big companies like HPE, IBM and Quantum, but does it mean that the market is growing?

Formerly the only figures publicly published on the tape market came from the Santa Clara Consulting Group but the analyst firm has stopped its calculation at the end of 2014, maybe because the number of clients in tape business declined. Here are the last stats from SCCG:

Tape cartridges revenue in $ million

sccg
Why suddenly, in 2015, the market rebounded after a long diminishing trend? It does not rebound.

The capacity shipped is up Y/Y 17.8.% but it's the result of the increased capacity of the individual LTO cartridges with each generation, native 1.5TB (+88%) for LTO-5 in 2010, to 2.5TB (+67%) for LTO-6 in 2013 and 6TB (+140%) for LTO-7 in 2015. The global increased LTO capacity in 2015 is much lower than that in percentage. And customers are not only new ones entering in tape, a lot of them just migrating to higher capacity drives and cartridges.

That the same currently for HDDs: the worldwide capacity shipped is increasing as the individual capacity of the drives is going up, but the global value of this market is decreasing.

Our opinion is that the worldwide tape market continues to decrease. It's now all about totally LTO - if you except tape for mainframes from IBM and Oracle/StorageTek -. There few DDS DAT used. DLT, AIT, QIC and 8mm are practically dead.

We are waiting for other figures from the LTO consortium to know the real situation of the tape market. The press release does not reveal the two main figures to prove that the value is going up: the number of drives and cartridges shipped. It only said: "Shipments in 2015 reflect a small decrease in media unit shipments over the prior year." What do you mean by "small decrease"?

There are now only four companies really involved in manufacturing of LTO-7: HP and IBM for the drives (Quantum is an OEM of HP), Fujifilm and Sony for the media (Hitachi Maxell stopped after LTO-6 according to its web site, Imation and TDK since 2014 are no more making cartridges). At the time of LTO-1, Seagate was a member of the LTO consortium but its tape division was spun off as Seagate Removable Storage Solutions, later renamed Certance, which was subsequently acquired by Quantum.

Today LTO is no more used for backup but for archiving only,
in competition with Blu-ray, but with two disadvantages:

  • - access time desperately slow: an average of 50 to 60 seconds for the first file
  • - relative compatibility: with a Blu-Ray drive, you can read about all the former generation of optical discs including the first CD-ROM in 1997; with a LTO-7 drive you can read and write LTO-6, not the former ones, and read LTO-5 and -6 only, meaning that you are obliged to migrate regularly data to a new generation of LTO format, a difficulty for a long-term archiving media; furthermore, it is recommended to read all the cartridges each one or two years to verify if the data are correctly registered, a lengthy process.

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