The power of LTO-8 tape
Much has changed since the compact cassette had a data capacity of 660 kilobytes per side of a 90-minute tape. The cassette tapes were made of polyester plastic film with a magnetic coating.
Today we lived to see the combination of three main elements: nanocubic technology, better transfer speed, higher capacity. We now have the eighth generation of LTO tapes, which feature, among other things, much better recording stability.
The latest generation of Ultrium 8 tapes allows for backup and archiving of large amounts of data. Ultrium 8 tapes feature high data transfer rates of 900 MB/s and 360 MB/s, and can hold 30 TB and 12 TB of data (for compressed and uncompressed files, respectively).
Due to the popularity and ease of acquiring LTO-8 media, they are increasingly being deployed.
Customers who use HPC solutions and previously used LTO-6 for their archives appreciate the move to LTO-8. They point to the main and most important benefit from their point of view - a huge jump in available capacity. With about 7,000 library slots fully loaded with LTO-6 media of 2.5 TB each, it gives a total native capacity of 17.5 PB. Migrating to LTO-8 drives and tapes at 12.0 TB of capacity yields a whopping 84 PB, almost 5 times as much. That's a lot of room to scale as needed. There is also a big improvement in performance. LTO-6 drives have a transfer rate of 160 MB per second, while LTO-8 has a transfer rate as high as 360 MB per second. This means that fewer drives are needed to achieve the same performance. As a result, TCO also gets a significant increase because we need fewer drives and fewer tapes.
Reliability is another value of modern LTO tape, which has been confirmed in many migration projects performed by some very well-known HPC centers. During the migration process, data is recovered from older type tapes and then rewritten to their latest generation. After the checksum verification process, we hear that there were few or no read errors or data loss during the migration process.
Costs
Today, one of the main challenges for IT professionals is estimating storage holdings on different platforms. IT professionals have to make strategic decisions about long-term storage and need the most accurate data to make optimal decisions.
The free online tool, developed by storage economics expert Brad Johns Consulting and sponsored by Fujifilm, calculates 5- and 10-year total scenarios
cost of ownership, using tape, disk and cloud storage libraries. The cost data comes from publicly available sources.
The results of the analysis can change the backup strategy.
How much can you save by using tape for enterprise backup/archival storage?
Figure 1 Example calculation of cost reduction by using LTO-8 tapes
Fujifilm is the world's leading manufacturer of LTO tapes, with more than 60% production share for all LTO generations. Fujifilm LTO tapes are certified and approved for all LTO tape drives.