108,457PB of LTO Compressed Capacity Shipped in 2017

The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM Corporation and Quantum Corp. released their annual tape media shipment report, detailing year-over-year shipments.

The report showed a record 108,457PB of total tape capacity (compressed (2)) shipped in 2017, an increase of 12.9% over the previous year.

“This year, we’ve seen a rising interest in tape technology from a variety of industries – particularly from those who prioritize protecting their important data from ransomware attack and who require solutions for long-term data retention,” said Chris Powers, VP HPE Storage. “With our recent announcement of the updated LTO technology roadmap, we expect to see the amount of capacity shipped continue to grow year-over-year as we provide customers with a cost-effective and secure storage solution.“

To put this amount of tape capacity into perspective, 2PB of data is equivalent to roughly the amount of information in all United States’ research libraries (1). Multiply that number by 54,228 for a better understanding of the massive amount of data capacity shipped in 2017.

With new LTO-8 technology specifications designed to enable customers to store up to 30TB of compressed capacity, and the LTO-7 cartridge initialized as Type M media giving customers the opportunity to write 9TB (22TB compressed) on a new LTO-7 cartridge using LTO-8 drives, 2018 media capacity shipments are expected to soar as tape users migrate to these newer technologies. The increased adoption of LTO-7 technology also remains a key contributor to this capacity increase.

“Many organizations continue to rely on tape for their long-term archive and high-capacity, low-cost storage needs,” said Phil Goodwin, research director, IDC. “Moreover, having tape as part of a backup trategy can provide an ‘air gap’ to help protect against data loss due to ransomware. The higher capacity, faster throughput of the new LTO-8 technology offers continued price-to-performance gains for organizations using tape in their data centers.“

Media unit shipments in 2017 reflect a small decrease over the prior year, which is typical as the market anticipates the introduction of the new LTO-8 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-7 technologies.

(1) Source: https://www.zmescience.com/science/how-big-data-can-get
(2) Assuming a 2.5:1 compression achieved with larger compression history buffer available beginning with LTO-6 drives.

Read also:
LTO-8 Soon Available From IBM
Native 12TB and 360MB/s, 2.5X more with compression
2017.10.16 | Press Release | [with our comments]
Two New Generations of LTO Added to Roadmap
LTO-11 (native 96TB) and LTO-12 (192TB)
2018.02.15 | Press Release