LTO TAPES …. OVER 100 MILLION SOLD

[Anonymous]

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh090808-story10.html
LTO Tapes: Over 100 Million Served
The
Linear Tape Open (LTO) form factor for tape drives just keeps hitting
higher and higher numbers. Last week, the three big players behind
LTO–IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum–said that since the first LTO
products were announced at the turn of the millennium, a large number
of tape decks and a huge number of tape cartridges have been sold.

How
many? As of last week, some 2.5 million LTO drives have shipped, with a
million of those units shipping since the third quarter of 2006. The
LTO format was launched in 1998, and products started coming to market
in the fall of 2000 from IBM, HP, and Seagate Technology, which spun
out its LTO business as Certance before it was acquired in October 2004
by Quantum. The industry is currently on its fourth generation of
technology, LTO-4, and although the consortium has had to back off a
bit on capacity and performance roadmaps for the LTO format, they have
done a pretty good job given the limits of tape technology in keeping
the technology relevant as data storage just explodes all around us.
The LTO-4 format provides 1.6 TB cartridges that have 240 MB/sec data
transfer rates with compression turned on, which is a lot of
improvement compared to LTO-1 drives and tapes, which had a compressed
capacity of 200 GB and a data transfer rate of 40 MB/sec. On the
current roadmap, LTO-5 is expected to deliver 3.2 TB tapes and drives
that can push 360 MB/sec (again, with compression), and LTO-6 will
sport 6.4 TB tapes and a data rate of 540 MB/sec. That’s a factor of 32
improvement in data capacity and factor of 13.5 improvement in data
transfer rates. It’s pretty obvious which one is the more difficult
aspect of tape technology to push.

Anyway, the LTO Consortium
also wanted to let everyone know that over 100 million LTO cartridges
have shipped to date, and they represent an aggregate compressed
capacity of 40 exabytes of storage across all of those LTO generations.
Because we always do this statistic in the IT racket to humanize the
numbers, that is 40 trillion books’ worth of data, or about 1 million
copies of the Library of Congress. Of course, we all know in IT that a
lot of data out there eating up space in not in textual format, but all
kinds of dense files like digital photos, streaming media, zillions of
copies of useless junk, and such.

[Author]

September 9, 2008 at 11:52 AM