4 Million LTO Drives and 200 Million Cartridges Shipped

A little more than a decade ago was the formation of the LTO Program.

Today it reaches milestones of more than 4 million LTO drives and nearly 200 million LTO tape cartridges shipped since the Program’s inception.

This translates into more than 80,000PB (uncompressed) of storage capacity on LTO Ultrium tape worldwide.

That’s a lot of data. Here are a few things to consider:

• 1TB is all the X-ray films in a large technological hospital
• 10TB represents the printed collection of the U. S. Library of Congress
• 2PB represents the content of all U.S. academic research libraries
• 200PB is the equivalent to all printed material
• 5,000PB is all of the words ever spoken by human beings

It’s not only the increase in capacity and data transfer rates driving these figures. The LTO Program designed an open platform for compatibility among multiple providers, helping to enable options for storage managers to keep costs low and systems simple. The technology has delivered features such as tape hardware encryption to help secure data, WORM capability to address compliance needs and media partitioning to open the door for new use cases and applications such as the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) to help make tape data access and management easier.

The need for compatible tape backup and archive solutions remains an important part of the IT infrastructure – and this is more important than ever as the amount of data stored on tape continues to increase.

The LTO Ultrium Generation 6 format is designed to continue to provide functionality to enable broader use of the technology in a range of solutions. Earlier this month the LTO Program announced plans to release the specifications for LTO Ultrium generation 6 that are expected to call for more than double the compressed capacity of the previous generation and further increase transfer rates helping to protect more data assets while providing open standards including backwards read and write compatibility and cross vendor interchange.