- Lto Cape establishes a new capacity record with 176.5 exabytes sent
- Compression inflates real masking 70.6eb uncompressed data capacity
- LTO-10 Costs increase the long-standing disqualibility advantage of the long-standing tape
The LTO program, backed by HPE, IBM and Quantum, has reported a new high shipping of tape, with 176.5 former LTO media -sent envied in 2024.
The announcement says that this marks the fourth consecutive year of growth for the tape format, driven by the expansion of hybrid cloud strategies and the demands of AI and automatic learning infrastructure.
The figure, however, comes with an asterisk. The 176.5EB is a total of compressed capacity, not the raw figure. According to the standard compression ratio 2.5: 1 of the LTO program, the uncompressed total is closer to 70.6eb. That is the real amount of real data that the tapes could contain if compression does not apply.
Price Hurdles
Since compression depends on the type of data: some files are well compressed, others such as video or encrypted data barely, these numbers can be misleading in terms of practical storage delivered.
“Establishing a new growth record for the fourth consecutive year, Lto tape technology continues to demonstrate its longevity as a leading business storage solution,” said Bruno Hald, general manager, secondary storage, Quantum.
“Organizations that navigate through the AI/ML era need to reconfigure their storage architectures to keep up, and LTO tape technology is an essential piece of puzzle for those looking Improved storage capacities.
However, those “friendly” advantages are under pressure.
LTO-10, the latest generation of tape, has a high price, with cartridges that are sold for between $ 275 and $ 315. That puts little more than 2 times the cost per Terabyte (native) compared to the previous versions, and although the capacity of LTO-10 is higher, the speed remains the same as Lto-9.
Phil Goodwin of IDC sees Lto as part of a broader strategy. “The unique combination of scalability, profitability and tape cyber resilience makes it a valuable component for companies,” he said.
While the tape still offers a long-term value, especially as part of a stepped storage model, the price of LTO-10 can slow the adoption.
For many companies, spending hundreds per cartridge could be difficult to justify when lower cost options such as cold storage in the cloud continue to expand.
The LTO program emphasizes the out -of -line resilience and low energy raffle, but its strongest point of sale has always been the price.
A $ 315 for 30TB native storage, that is a more difficult story to tell.
