The tapes used to listen to songs are basically dead, but the LTO tape used for storage is still widely used, which is one of the best choices for cold storage in data centers, and the market size is also very large, with IBM, HPE (Hewlett Packard Packard Enterprise), and Quanta being the three main players.
According to the latest annual report, the total global LTO storage tape shipment capacity in 2023 will be 152.9EB, and the more familiar unit is 152900000TB, an increase of 3.14% compared with 2022.
LTO storage tape shipments had been steadily increasing significantly in 2017 and up until 2021, and after several years of turmoil, they began to regain their vitality in 2021.
According to the report, tape's growth in the past two years has been mainly due to the demand for AI storage, "large-scale data centers and large enterprises' rapidly growing data generation and infrastructure expansion."
As early as the 90s of the 20th century, there was a view that tape storage was short-lived, but it was still being carried forward, because it still had some irreplaceable advantages, such as large capacity, easy offline, high security, life span of up to 30 years, etc., especially suitable for data that does not need to be accessed frequently, such as archiving and backup.
The downside is that the performance is too slow, and it can only transfer a few tens of terabytes per hour.
Not long ago, Spectra Logic, an American company with 25 years of experience in the design and manufacturing of tape libraries, released its latest product, the "Spectra Cube", which can provide up to 75PB of storage space, or 75,000TB.
As the name suggests, the box-shaped tape library measures 201.7x115.3×91.2 centimeters and weighs 466.3 kilograms.
It supports LTO-6/7/8/9 tape storage standards, with 1670 slots, supports up to 30 half-height or 16 full-height tape drives, and has a maximum native capacity of 30PB and a maximum compressed capacity of 75PB.
It has a maximum native transfer speed of 32.4TB per hour and a maximum compressed transfer speed of 81.0TB per hour.
At this rate, it would take up to 38.6 days to fill the library.
The speed of the tape library is not a long term, but the benefit is that it is extremely large and stable, with a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 250,000 hours and a mean time between failures (MCBF) of more than 2 million cycles, which can achieve almost no offline time.
Spectra Cube非常适合云服务。