IT House April 26 news, decades ago, hard disk drives (HDDs) with fast speed advantages, gradually replaced the traditional tape drive. Then in recent years, solid-state memory (SSDs) have gradually replaced HDDs for the same reason. Even so, the open linear tape (LTO) devices that came out in the 1990s did not fade out of the market. Even to some extent, with the surge in ransomware attacks, tape storage sales have instead ushered in a wave of increases.
Tape storage has never gone away for big data storage companies, and tape is a fairly old storage technology by modern standards. There are tape-based storage systems that date back to the first commercial PCs of the 50s. Linear tape (LTO) came a little later than that, emerging in the 90s. It's an open standard for tape storage created by a cross-industry consortium and is manufactured today by the likes of HP Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum.
2021 is also a brilliant year for LDOs. According to an LTO sales report, using data provided by the company responsible for manufacturing LTO tapes, total tape shipments in 2021 were 148 exabytes, which far exceeded 105 exabytes in 2020, or the previous record 114 exabytes in 2019. That said, tape sales in 2021 are up 41 percent from 2020 and 30 percent higher than the 2019 record of 114 ExaBytes.
What are the reasons behind the growth? Part of the reason is increased cybersecurity and malware threats such as ransomware.
"We continue to see enterprises return to tape technology for storage solutions that provide high capacity, reliability, long-term data archiving, and stronger data protection measures, especially as cybersecurity threats spike," said Patrick Osborne, managing director and vice president of storage at HPE.
Unless some hacker breaks into a warehouse made up of tape drives, inserts them all, and then waits for lengthy times to steal all the data on each drive, the data can't be easily corrupted or copied.
IT House understands, of course, that it is not possible for companies to rely on tape drives as primary backups today, but more as second- or third-stage backups in case something goes wrong.