Record of 153EB of LTO Compressed Capacity Shipped WW in 2023
But growth of only 3% over 2022
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on May 22, 2024 at 2:02 pmThe LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM Corporation and Quantum Corporation, released their annual tape media shipment report, detailing Y/Y shipments through 4Q23.
The report reveals a record 152.9* of total tape capacity (compressed) shipped in 2023, with a growth of 3.14% over 2022, driven in part by rapid data generation and the increased infrastructure requirements of hyperscalers and enterprises.
“LTO tape technology continues to realise annual gains. LTO tape utilisation is poised to expand even further as customers increasingly require higher storage capacity and recognise the benefits of the technology,” said G. Kyle Fitze, VP, OEM and partner enabled products, HPE storage. “We remain dedicated to improving and innovating further around LTO tape technology for the fast-evolving needs of organisations now and in the years to come.”
These benefits include low TCO – which organisations can determine using the LTO Ultrium TCO Calculator – in addition to strong security and enhanced sustainability.
With shipped capacity remaining high in 2023, LTO tape technology proves to be a choice solution for mitigating common challenges created by the proliferation of unstructured data due to recent advancements in technologies such as AI.
As AI and related technologies cause increases in storage requirements and costs, LTO tape technology makes the management of vast amounts of data more cost-effective and sustainable while delivering comprehensive protection against data breaches, which continue to grow in number and sophistication.
“The latest annual tape capacity shipment media report signifies the continued importance of LTO tape technology in the digital storage hierarchy not only today, but also far into the future as storage needs evolve in complexity and cost,” said Tom Coughlin, storage analyst and president, Coughlin Associates. “LTO tape will endure as a critical component of storage architectures across the enterprise, especially as tape technology itself continues to improve to handle even larger volumes of data and more intensive workloads.”
LTO-9 is the latest format specification for LTO Ultrium tape drives and media, providing significantly more capacity and higher performance than the previous generation. In addition to full backward read and write compatibility with LTO-8 cartridges, LTO-9 specs include multi–layer security support with hardware–based encryption, immutable WORM functionality, and fast data access with the Linear Tape File System (LTFS).
LTO-9 technology offers a 45TB* compressed tape cartridge, representing a 50% capacity boost over LTO-8 and a 1,400% increase over LTO-5 technology launched a decade ago, with transfer speeds of up to 400MB/s (native), 1,000 MB/s (compressed*).
In 2022, the LTO Program announced an extended LTO tape roadmap that calls for plans to achieve up to 1.4PB of compressed capacity per cartridge by LTO-14.
LTO roadmap
*Assumes a 2.5:1 compression achieved with larger compression history buffer available beginning with LTO generation 6 drives.
Comments
As we already comment, we regret that the LTO Program just released the total yearly capacity of LTO, and not also the number of LTO drives shipped - probably down at the same time - to have a better idea of the trend of this market.
Y/Y growth in capacity of 3% from 2023 over 2022 is not a lot if you consider that the LTO cartridge capacity is regularly increased.
In 2022, the total capacity announced was up only 0.5% over 2021.
Finally, LTO as well as the global tape market is stagnating and will not increased in the next years, being in competition notably with HDDs to backup data, and more and more concentrating on archiving only.
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