Piql White Paper - Magnetic Tape Technology in a Multi-node Archival Storage System

Magnetic tape technology in a multi-node archival storage system Whitepaper 4

TAPE TECHNOLOGIES AND SUPPLIERS

The long-term decline of the digital tape market for secondary storage has been countered over the last decade by a steady increase in the use of tape for archiving due to its low environmental footprint, high level of data integrity, and low cost per GB. Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape technology dominates a market in which today in reality there are only two players: • IBM who manufacture all LTO-8 (current generation) tape drives and their own proprietary ‘Enterprise’ TS1150 and TS1155 tape drives • Oracle who manufacture their own proprietary “Enterprise” T10000 series tape drives. Over the past 30 years, there have been numerous digital tape formats. Nearly all have now been re- tired, leaving three formats: Linear Tape Open (LTO), which is an open standard; IBM TS11xx and Oracle T10000 proprietary formats, which are also market- ed as “Enterprise” tape drives. In the past, differences in performance, capacity, and reliability earned the proprietary formats this name but today it can be ar- gued this is no longer true. Since the initial release of LTO-1 in 2000, year after year LTO drives and media have continued to dominate the tape market due to the efforts of the LTO Consortium (Quantum, IBM, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise). For the past several years, the LTO format accounts for over 96% of all tape cartridge shipments. This market dominance has made it more difficult each year for IBM and Oracle to continue to develop and deliver next-generation formats and technology for their proprietary drives.

Rumour and speculation abound about the long- term viability of Oracle’s tape business, their cessa- tion of development on the T10000 drive series at the T10000D and scaling down of their own resourc- es. It is a widely held opinion that IBM will be the sole manufacturer of enterprise-class tape drives and media in the years to come and in fact IBM has been the sole manufacturer of the open LTO format for several years. IBM supply all LTO-8 drives to other tape library manufacturers (Oracle, SpectraLogic) and members of the LTO consortium itself (HPE, Quan- tum). There are currently two manufacturers of current generation LTO-8 media: FUJIFILM and Sony. Media for the proprietary drives from IBM and Oracle is sin- gle sourced.