What's the Business Value of LTO Tape Storage

The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs) - HP, IBM and Quantum – recently released a total industry LTO tape media shipment data report, announcing a record 76,000 PB (compressed) of total capacity shipped in 2015 alone, an increase of 17.8 percent over the prior year. The milestone shows that more data is being stored on tape media than ever before and provides a clear picture of the long-term viability and importance of tape in today’s rapidly shifting storage environment.

The report also showed more than 385,000 PB of total data capacity has been shipped since the introduction of LTO Ultrium cartridges in 2000. A petabyte (PB) equals roughly four times the amount of data contained in the Library of Congress. For an understanding of the amount of data shipped to date, multiply the amount of data in the Library of Congress by 385,000, and imagine all of that data stored on tape!

So why does tape remain so popular for data protection in general and archive in particular?
The answer lies in the on-going business value of the technology. Tape has made great technological strides over the last decade – from a performance, capacity, reliability and usability perspective. But while feeds and speeds are important, the executive boards of most companies care more about how technology can lower costs, reduce risk and improve productivity in their organization. And it is in this business context that tape continues to be viewed as important and relevant.

Containing costs: LTO tape delivers 85% cost savings compared to disk
A new ESG analyst study reports that in a typical large-scale data retention usage scenario, LTO solutions can yield nearly $13.5M in estimated cost savings over a ten-year time horizon. That’s a 577% return on investment over 10 years! Additionally, ESG discovered that in the given situation the annual total cost of ownership (TCO) for an LTO tape solution generates a significant 85% savings compared to a present mode of operation representative of all-disk storage.

Reducing risk
The overriding customer defined metric for a successful active archive is whether the data can be retrieved when needed. The LTO tape portfolio of drives, libraries and media employs a number of features to help provide high data integrity including read after write verification to help ensure the data has been written accurately, servo tracking mechanisms to provide precision head and tape alignment, up to 250,000 mean time between failure hours for drives, and advanced media formulations that can allow up to a 30-year shelf life or more.

LTOTape Libraries also deliver a range of reliability and availability benefits including hardware reduncdancy, tape manageability software, self-managing, self-healing tape archives, tested to extremes LTO tape media and KMIP-verified key management solution support . In addition lightweight, rugged and encryptable tape cartridges are easily and securely transported off site. This means that archive data on tape can be held off-line safe from the threats to on-line data from viruses, hackers and cyber-attacks.

The recently introduced LTO-7 portfolio also delivers higher reliability with a two orders of magnitude superior bit error rate compared to LTO-6 which is particularly important for Big Data archives. Put another way, you are now more likely to hit by lightning, get killed by a shark or win a multi-million dollar lottery than encounter an error on LTO-7 media that could not be fixed by ECC!

Improving productivity
With the pace of data growth continuing to accelerate, businesses require a fast and easy way to expand and manage their archive infrastructure. Tape is effortlessly scalable. Adding capacity is simply a case of adding additional tape cartridges to a tape drive or tape library. With a product portfolio that spans from tape media through standalone tape drives to tape libraries that accommodate more than 180 PB in a single system, LTO Tape Storage delivers virtually limitless capacity. Take a look at our introductory tape autoloaders like the Overland Storage NEOs T24 with 24 slots and capacity for dual drives.  Or perhaps the NEOs T48, a 48 slot tape library and capacity to 4 drives.  LTO-7 is now shipping.  Call your BackupWorks.com rep today for a quote at 866 801 2944

Linear Tape File System (LTFS) provides a self-describing file system on a LTO-5, LTO-6 or LTO-7 cartridge, which makes tape as simple to access and use as a removable USB flash drive as well as reducing software dependencies for the use of tape for long-term archives.