Tape Drives

History

2021: Tape Market Soars 40 %

In 2021, the total volume of tape drives delivered increased by 40% and amounted to a record 148 Ebytes, taking into account compression. This was reported by Ultrium LTO on April 19, 2022, citing data from analysts Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, IBM and Quantum.

The market growth is due to the growing capacity of cartridges, as well as due to compatibility support, which allows you to use older versions of tapes on other equipment.

Tape market soared 40% year over year

Tape technology has proven to be an indispensable tool in the fight against cybersecurity, as it provides the air gap that is needed to deprive criminals of the physical communications needed to access, encrypt, or delete data. Anti-extortion trends also increase the need for organizations to adopt a 3-2-1-1 backup rule, which implies at least three copies or versions of data stored on two different media, one off-site and the other offline.

Despite significant business disruptions and uncertainty in 2021 , LTO tape shipments have achieved the biggest growth since 2006, surpassing the previous record set in 2019! We continue to watch organizations return to tape technology, seeking storage solutions that offer high capacity, reliability, long-term data archiving, and more robust data protection measures, especially in the face of growing cybersecurity threats, "said Patrick Osborne, CEO and Vice President of HPE Storage.

Tape market soared 40% year over year

As business and technology leaders around the world continue to monitor trends in data storage and management, LTO addresses the massive growth of data, mostly unstructured, while reducing costs. At the same time, this helps in implementing environmental initiatives and ensuring sustainability, and ransomware and malware continue to develop and appear in a way that no one can predict, which makes cybersecurity one of the main problems for organizations. No company or business can be sure that decisions for April 2022 will cope with the threats of May 2022.

Tape drives, compared to SSD and HDD, are more energy efficient, easier to maintain, usually keep your information longer, and better protected from cyber attacks. LTO-9 is designed to support increased capacity of tape cartridges up to 45 TB compressed. LTO-9 drives provide full backward compatibility with LTO-8 cartridges during reading and writing, as well as many previously presented features, including support for multilevel security using hardware encryption, WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many) and support for the Linear Tape File System (LTFS).^[1]

Notes