In context: The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) format for tape-based magnetic knowledge recording was developed within the Nineties as an open-standard different to proprietary tape codecs. The expertise supplies native encryption and compression assist, and it’s nonetheless probably the most used “chilly” storage media in knowledge middle and enterprise environments.
The three firms behind the LTO Consortium not too long ago launched the newest annual report on magnetic tape expertise shipments, which set a brand new storage capability file in 2023. the LTO members– Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum Company – collectively acknowledged collectively stated that tape media shipped to market have now reached 152.9 exabytes of whole (compressed) capability, with 1 exabyte being equal to 1 million terabytes or 1 billion gigabytes.
LTO magnetic tapes grew by 3.14 p.c over 2022, the consortium stated, with hyperscalers and enterprises rising their storage wants as a result of “fast knowledge era” and elevated infrastructure necessities. For sure, the LTO Consortium is quoting AI as one of many primary causes for the brand new record-setting outcomes achieved by LTO shipments.
The LTO Ultrium expertise has been round for many years now, offering an affordable and supposedly dependable strategy to retailer large quantities of digital knowledge that may be simply archived offline by merely eradicating the tapes and bodily placing them on the cabinets. LTO magnetic tapes aren’t precisely fast in I/O operations although, which signifies that they’re principally used to archive “unstructured knowledge” that does not essentially want fixed entry.
In response to the LTO Consortium, tape is a superb answer for the storage challenges created by AI providers and different associated, data-hungry applied sciences. Chatbots and ML algorithms enhance storage necessities and infrastructure prices, whereas LTO tapes ought to make the administration of huge quantities of digital knowledge less expensive and sustainable.
LTO is an ever-evolving, backward-compatible normal that’s now at its ninth era (LTO-9). An LTO-9 drive supplies a forty five TB compressed capability with a 50 p.c enhance over LTO-8, or a 1,400 p.c enhance over LTO-5 tapes launched a decade in the past. LTO-9 switch speeds go as much as 400 megabytes per second in native mode or 1,000 megabytes in compressed mode, with extra embedded options corresponding to hardware-based encryption, immutable WORM (Write-As soon as, Learn-Many) operations.
In response to storage analyst Tom Coughlin, the newest annual report by the LTO Consortium highlights the “continued significance” of LTO expertise for the world’s storage wants. LTO tapes will proceed to enhance and have a essential function in enterprise storage architectures, offering digital firms and knowledge facilities with an answer particularly designed to deal with massive volumes of information and extra intensive workloads. The way forward for AI is unquestionably written on tape.
