LTO Program Announces Price Per Gigabyte Now Less Than One Penny
The LTO Program announced today that LTO Generation 6 tape has
reached another cost-per-gigabyte milestone of below a cent. Today, LTO
storage can be as low as 0.8 cents per gigabyte and $8 per terabyte based on the
current market price of tape media.
As the price per gigabyte for tape storage continues to drop,
LTO plays an increasingly vital role in the datacenter for a range of unique
datasets and stages in the data lifecycle, LTO allows organizations to keep more
data for longer periods of time by storing the right data at the right time on
the most cost-effective storage tier.
When factors such as equipment, media, maintenance, energy
costs and floor space are taken into account, LTO tape storage technology
continues to be the most cost-effective and energy-efficient solution for data
storage managers worldwide. The Clipper Group found that the average disk-based
solution costs 26 times the total cost of ownership for an average tape-based
solution.
The cost of energy alone for the average disk-based solution
exceeds the entire total cost of ownership for the average tape-based solution.
Tape, with a more than 60-year history of success in the data center, has
evolved to a point where it can be the solution of choice for the preservation
of data in every data center. Tape is an obvious solution, so why not use it?
The current generation of LTO technology – LTO generation 6 –
supports
tape cartridge storage compressed
capacity of up to 6.25TB, more than twice the compressed capacity over the
previous generation, and
tape drive data transfer rates
of up to 400MB per second for over 1.4 terabytes of storage performance an hour
per drive. As with previous generations, LTO-6 drives provide backward
compatibility with the ability to read and write LTO generation 5 cartridges and
read LTO generation 4 cartridges, helping to preserve media investments and ease
implementation.
Last fall, the LTO Program announced the extension of the LTO
product roadmap through generation 10. The extended roadmap now includes
generations 9 and 10. The new generation guidelines call for compressed
capacities of 62.5 TB for generation 9 and 120 TB for generation 10.