A new analyst report has hit the LTO.org newsstand called Powering the AI Era: How LTO Tape Delivers Unprecedented Economic and Strategic Business Value by Solutions North Consulting LLC. The paper examines the data challenges of AI-driven analytics, finding true total cost of ownership, AI’s race for more and better data, and much more. In this NewsBytes, we pull out the microscope and take a close look at some of the highlights of this intriguing paper.
TCO ASSESSMENTS
First and foremost, the paper tackles one of the modern era’s toughest questions: how to model real storage total cost of ownership (TCO) in the face of rapid data growth. It explains that “I&O leaders are more than moderately concerned about the cost of running artificial intelligence” and provides TCO comparisons of tape, disk, and managed storage providers (e.g., cloud) across 3 capacity points (5PB, 10PB, 40PB). The tape solution is shown to be up to about 5 times less expensive than the disk or cloud examples.
Regarding cloud storage, the paper notes that “cloud costs have escalated and data managers are feeling like they have lost control of data governance.” It explains that, “Cloud storage may look cheap initially, but just a 2% monthly data egress can trigger a massive 164% spike in total storage costs. Modern tape solutions never have egress charges.” A prevailing trend is data repatriation, bringing data archives out of the cloud to on-site premises on tape. The report quotes a study by Further Market Research stating that “More than 70% of enterprise data will not have any enduring need for the performance of SSDs and HDDs, but will have greatly expanding needs for low-cost Sustainability, Immutability and Security.”
Another key insight is that tape storage can provide “data protection and durability at the lowest cost of ownership.” That’s because tape storage is the lifeline for:
- Cyber Resiliency: The ultimate air-gapped [offline] defense.
- Budgetary Alignment: Dramatic reduction in TCO vs. Cloud and HDD.
- AI Performance: Predictive indexing makes archive data accessible again.
THE MODERN AI PIVOT
Earlier in the paper, the author explains that “we no longer live in a world of complex tape operations. Modern tape solutions have evolved into integrable, AI-driven architectures.”
“AI-driven predictive indexing now anticipates retrieval requests, pre-staging data to solid-state or HDD tiers before the data is required. This integration with Software Defined Storage (SDS) allows tape to behave as an object-storage tier, offering the economics of cold storage.”
AI INITIATIVES ARE COMPLEX
Another area covered is the complexity of managing large amounts of data for AI initiatives. The analyst notes that, “To scale AI initiatives successfully, organizations must seamlessly manage petabytes of governed information across every phase of development. LTO tape technology provides low-cost, critical, active business support at every step.”
Those steps are outlined in the paper, from Raw Data Ingest to Model Checkpoint Preservation, and illustrated by a graphic showing AI data lifecycle architecture and tiered storage.
VERIFIABLE DATA PROTECTION
The paper elaborates on the importance of data protection and states, “To ensure robust AI governance and audibility, LTO tape technology provides a highly secure, immutable foundation that is critical for regulatory compliance and risk management.” It discusses object locking, regulations such as GDPR, AES-256 encryption, and more. It states that “By seamlessly integrating with SIEM platforms like Splunk® and LogRythm®, LTO tape technology guarantees that an organization’s critical AI telemetry and historical models remain verifiable, secure, and protected against sophisticated cyber threats.”
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF TAPE
One interesting topic covered is a review of recording technologies, including Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) and Cloud storage. Powering the AI Era: How LTO Tape Delivers Unprecedented Economic and Strategic Business Value notes that using SMR technology, which can increase HDD storage density by utilizing overlapping data tracks, takes on “70% of the complexities of tape while realizing less than 25% of the savings.” A footnote in the paper, about that data point, links to the LTO.org TCO Calculator Tool, which is used to compare the costs of storing data on disk, tape, or cloud technologies. We will look more closely at the paper’s discussion on total storage costs below.
The report concludes by claiming that “Tape is not merely a storage medium; it is an organization’s ultimate line of defense—immutable, encrypted, and offline … LTO is an indispensable hero for modern business.”
You can access the Solutions North Powering the AI Era here.
