Fujifilm Manufactured 100 million LTO Cartridges
Fujifilm Recording Media USA, Inc., a subsidiary of Fujifilm
Holdings Corporation, a manufacturer of storage media, has manufactured over 100
million LTO (Linear Tape-Open) Ultrium data cartridges since its release of the
first generation of LTO in 2000
This equates to over 53 thousand
petabytes of storage and more than 41 million miles of tape,
enough to wrap around the globe 1,653 times.
Data growth and extended retention period requirements are
challenging corporations, government agencies and other organizations that are
faced with limited IT budgets. As a result, there is an increasing need to cost
effectively store large volumes of data over long periods of time. The LTO
Ultrium format, an open tape storage format, meets the challenge by delivering
performance, capacity and reliability while offering lower TCO compared to other
technologies.
Since 2000, Fujifilm has led the development of large-capacity
LTO Ultrium data tape for backup and
archival applications. The most recent Fujifilm
LTO Ultrium 6 data cartridge is based
on Fujifilm's Nanocubic technology and incorporates Barium Ferrite (BaFe)
particles, with performance and longer archival life compared to conventional
metal particle (MP) tape. BaFe particles are also used in the production of
large multi-terabyte enterprise system data tape, supporting the needs of
various customers in diverse industries for their large volume backup and
archival needs.
"Fujifilm's achievements speak clearly to the success of the
LTO tape storage format," said Steve
Kenniston, business line executive, IBM data protection and retention. "We see
data center managers continue to use tape to protect data, as well as leverage
tape with new use cases, such as LTFS, to store the vast amounts of data
capacity they have while maximizing their overall dollar per terabyte. As
companies like Fujifilm keep breaking the barriers of storage capacity with
their technologies, the amount of corporate data stored on tape will only
continue to grow."
In January 2010, Fujifilm and IBM announced a world record in
data density on linear magnetic tape of 29.5 billion bits per square inch using
BaFe particles. This demonstrated the potential of a high capacity tape
cartridge capable of storing 35TB of uncompressed data. Fujifilm also conducted
a study that demonstrated the long term archivability of BaFe magnetic
particles, withstanding realistic storage environment simulations. Results
showed no change to BaFe magnetic properties under accelerated test methods,
proving its reliability well over 30 years.