After several years of minimal progress, the market for LTO tapes showed strong growth in 2024. According to the annual report of the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (HPE, IBM, Quantum), 176.5 exabytes (EB) of compressed tape capacity were brought to market worldwide.
That is 15.4 percent more than in 2023. The figures are based on a compression ratio of 2.5:1, which means that, on average, 2.5 times as much data can be stored as the tape physically offers in terms of capacity, thanks to software compression.
LTO stands for Linear Tape-Open, an open standard for magnetic tape data storage. The technology is widely used for archiving and backing up large amounts of data. It is characterized by low costs per terabyte stored, reliability, and the long life of the storage medium itself. Under good conditions, LTO tapes can last 10 to 30 years, while the hardware (such as tape drives) typically has a shorter lifespan.
Patent dispute
Shipment figures have fluctuated in recent years. In 2018, volume declined as a result of a patent dispute between Fujifilm and Sony, the only two manufacturers of LTO tape. That conflict temporarily limited the global availability of LTO-8 media, according to reports from LTO TPCs. In 2019, the market recovered to 114 EB, but the coronavirus pandemic caused another decline in 2020, to 105 EB. Recovery followed in 2021 with 148 EB, but growth stagnated in the following years: 0.5 percent in 2022 and just over 3 percent in 2023.
Quantum points out that the upturn in 2024 is partly due to the need to adapt storage architectures to applications involving AI and machine learning. LTO tape offers an energy-efficient, scalable, and secure solution for this. The introduction of LTO-10 later this year should further strengthen that position, although this generation will not offer any speed gains over LTO-9 and the expected capacity is slightly lower than previously predicted.
Despite the emergence of fast flash storage and flexible cloud solutions, tape remains strategically important according to the LTO organization. As a relatively inexpensive technology for long-term archiving, it also offers physical separation from the network, which provides protection against ransomware and other cyber threats.
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