LTO Tape Libraries

As cameras and other media devices steadily rise in number and improve in capability, sports broadcasters, production companies, and movie studios all face a mutually critical challenge: What to do with these expanding libraries of valuable content?

My thanks to Christophe Bertrand, a Senior Analyst at ESG, for his recent video which includes some interesting factoids from ESG’s 2018 Data Protection Landscape survey. The survey echoes my own observations as a member of organizations that care about such things, including the LTO Consortium, the Active Archive Alliance, and Quantum’s product marketing and product management team.

Randi Altman's postPerspective just published this article that talks about the value of LTO as a great archive storage solution for post houses. I’d like to add my own perspective on a few things, based on the article as well as recent conversations at IBC2018 and some different customers we have.

With macro-trends like looming Zettabyte scale unstructured data and the increasing threat from ransomware, LTO’s properties and attributes have made it a key technology in the future.

Your organization is collecting more and more data. Whether you are producing ultra-high-definition videos, analyzing human genomes, or using satellite imagery to study climate change, your growing data volumes are central to your work. Protecting and preserving that data must be a top priority.

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 21st century.

Over the past month, I've been lucky enough to spend a lot of time out in the field – connecting with a lot of interesting customers at industry events and spending quality time with Quantum’s regional sales teams around the globe. One common theme across all of this seems to be a resurgence in interest in LTO technology, based on two dynamics and two use cases.

The LTO Program announced yet another record year for LTO capacity shipments in 2017, with more than 108,000 PB of total compressed capacity shipped. That represents a 13% annual increase over 2016 and more than double the capacity shipped just four years ago, in 2013.

As we head into the celebration of Valentine’s Day, we look to the heartfelt version of tape – with some surprising statistics on sales of cassette tapes in 2017. Did you know (according to Nielsen Music), US cassette sales had a 35% increase over 2016 with 174,000 sold. We accredit this trend to “hipster” artists bringing back an old trend to differentiate their record launches including Lil Uzi Vert’s Luv is Rage, DJ Khaled’s Grateful, and Lana Del Rey’s Lust for Life.

Tape storage doesn’t make The Wall Street Journal very often, but this past year the most notable business journal in the US took time to highlight the increase in use of tape for data protection. Here are some key takeaways:

Recently, Quantum has had some success displacing Oracle tape libraries with Quantum Scalar® tape libraries. Quantum’s focus on tape and continued investment in storage technologies—like our new Scalar i3 and Scalar i6 tape libraries with the best storage density, and the introduction of LTO-8 this quarter—have driven customers to switch and save costs.