Three Reasons LTO Will Continue to Grow

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Yeah, that’s right. We believe in LTO, and we believe the market for LTO technology is going to continue to grow. LTO has emerged as a key storage technology in the 21^st century.

That’s why we’re investing in new tape library platforms, just launched LTO-8 and are already working on LTO-9.

Unless the world tips on its axis, LTO will continue on its current trajectory.

Here are three reasons why:

# 1 – Unstructured data growth will outpace Flash and HDD capacities

Unstructured data is growing exponentially and already represents the majority of the world’s total data. And devices like cameras and “IoT” devices and sensors are going to create exponentially more data – literally too much to be stored on all the world’s capacity of flash and HDD’s.

That unstructured data – generally larger files, generally the need to protect and preserve that data for years or decades – fits really well with LTO tape’s attributes. And whether this data is stored “on premise” or in the public cloud, most of it is going to end up on tape.

# 2 – Tape will be a key part of hyperscale infrastructures

Speaking of the cloud, more and more “hyperscale” public cloud providers are becoming public about their massive use of tape.  And as we’ve seen with other trends like hyperconvergence…the way that the public cloud vendors solve problems eventually makes its way back into the enterprise. In fact, with many of our StorNext customers today that tier to tape, they have effectively created a private cloud infrastructure that looks similar to the way that storage services are architected in the public cloud.

# 3 – Ransomware isn’t going away

Last but not least, tape’s inherent attribute as an “offline” storage medium makes it the most effective storage to protect against ransomware. Among our customers that use tape and manage it with a backup application, we are seeing a new use case emerge for LTO tape. It’s not about offsite storage, as much as providing an offline storage copy – a copy of data that is stored on a medium that has a physical “air gap” between the data and the network.

For all these reasons, we are continuing to invest in LTO and enhance our roadmap – both the technology itself and our tape library systems.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]