It’s estimated that by the year 2025 over 460 exabytes of data will be created daily worldwide bringing us in to the Zettabyte Era! Storage managers are clamoring to keep pace with this data growth phenomenon while managing near stagnant budgets, fending off cyberattacks, and reducing the carbon footprint. But good news from the LTO Program is on the way!
THE ZETTABYTE ERA HAS BEGUN
Did you know that every 24 hours:
- there are about 500 million tweets published
- nearly 300 billion emails sent
- 4 petabytes of Facebook data created
It’s estimated that by the year 2025 over 460 exabytes of data will be created daily worldwide bringing us in to the Zettabyte Era! What is a zettabyte? It’s a 1 followed by 21 zeros (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) but you might find it easier to think of it as a trillion gigabytes. Yikes!
Storage managers are clamoring to keep pace with this data growth phenomenon while managing near stagnant budgets, fending off cyberattacks, and reducing the carbon footprint. Good news is on the way to triumph over these storage challenges. The LTO Technology Provider Companies (TPCs) have recently announced news about the latest LTO tape technology – LTO Generation 9. Read on for the exciting details – they’re massive!
An LTO-9 tape cartridge can store up to a whopping 45 TBs of compressed data (assuming 2.5:1 compression) which is a 50% increase over LTO-8 tape. It provides full backward read and write compatibility with LTO-8 format cartridges. The new compressed capacity of 45 TB is a 22,500% increase over the original LTO-1 format tape.
In addition, LTO-9 boosts the data transfer rate up to 1,000 MB per second compressed (a 33% increase over LTO-8 tape). This translates to 3.6 terabytes per drive per hour, which is great news for IT managers as they strive to back up ever increasing amounts of data in the same amount of time. It significantly increases the total amount of data that can be stored using a modern tape automation system capable of supporting multiple LTO-9 drives simultaneously.
The new format supports many previously introduced features including enhanced security via hardware based encryption, WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many) functionality and ease of data movement via the Linear Tape File System (LTFS). It has the support of media manufacturers Sony and Fujifilm. As Sam Werner, VP Storage Product Management at IBM said in a recent press release:
“Building on more than two decades of data protection and storage innovation, LTO-9 offers end users more energy-efficient storage capacity than previous generations. It delivers a powerful, scalable and adaptable open-tape storage format that can provide industries around the globe secured and protected data against storage cyber threats.”
Sam Werner, IBM
Check out the LTO Ultrium Technology Roadmap for further information on how LTO is innovating to help you manage ever growing data storage needs.
HOW WAS IT DONE?
For those that like the techy details here are some of the levers the LTO gurus used to make the leaps to LTO-9 tape. First they made an increase in tape length of about 8% on slightly thinner media. They then increased the bit density, that is, kilobits per inch, by almost 4% and added about 35% more tracks. All of this adds up to more capacity helping to tame the colossal data growth onslaught. But that’s not all, LTO-9 still provides data security features to help protect sensitive information from cyber criminals. See how next.
DATA SECURITY NOW!
It is estimated that ransomware attacks increase about 15% per year. The disruption to an organization and cost to recover from an incident can be staggering. LTO tape technology is designed to provide easy backup and fast recovery and importantly, when a tape cartridge is removed from the drive the data is truly offline helping to prevent access from viruses and other malware assaults. In the event of an attack the offline tape can be used to speed recovery and reduce costs. LTO tape is a key ingredient to win against cyber threats.
LTO-9 technology is exciting! Follow the LTO program to get the latest storage info and technology updates at the LTO Twitter feed and LTO Linkedin site.
