HPE, IBM and Quantum's 2023 LTO Tape Media Shipment Report

TapTechNews May 27th news, HPE HPE, IBM and Quantum released the 2023 LTO tape media shipment report on May 21st this month.

According to the report, the long-established LTO Linear Open Tape achieved a new high in (compressed) capacity shipments last year, reaching 152.9 EB (1 exabyte = 1024 petabytes), with a year-on-year growth of 3.14%. This increase is significantly higher than the 0.5% in 2022.

The current latest LTO tape technology all supports a data compression ratio of 2.5:1, which means that the data announced this time is equivalent to 61.16 EB of raw capacity.

The press release believes that part of the reason for the continued growth of LTO tape shipment capacity is the acceleration of data generation and the increase in the demand for data infrastructure by enterprises.

The rapid development of technologies such as AI. has led to a surge in unstructured data. Tape storage is also considered the preferred solution to ease this challenge.

HPE Storage Division OEM and Partner Support Product Vice President G. KyleFitze said:

As customers increasingly need higher storage capacity and recognize the advantages of this technology, the utilization rate of LTO tape will be further expanded.

We will continue to be committed to further improvement and innovation around LTO tape technology to meet the rapidly developing needs of enterprises in the current and next few years.

Compared to the mechanical hard disk solution, LTO tape storage has an overall cost advantage in large-capacity archival storage.

At present, the LTO tape storage technology has come to the 9th generation, and a single tape cartridge can provide 18 TB of raw capacity and 45 TB of compressed capacity; the tape drive has a raw data transfer rate of 400 MB/s and a compressed data transfer rate of 1000 MB/s.

TapTechNews queried the data and learned that the capacity of the next five generations of LTO technology will all double.