Japan's Fujifilm Corporation has announced the launch of 40TB LTO Ultrium 10 data tapes, which are designed to help enterprises deal with the increasing number of ransomware incidents and growing regulatory pressure that requires platform data to be retained for longer periods of time for inspection. Tape storage is basically only for enterprises. Although the cost of the tape itself is not high for individuals and home users, the supporting equipment is very expensive and large in size, and usually individuals and home users do not have that much data that requires cold storage.
Speaking of cold storage, this means that the stored data does not need to be read frequently. For example, log files generated by the platform are usually archived and not viewed again (the probability of being pulled out for viewing again is extremely low or even zero) until these files are cleared after they expire.
The advantage of tape storage is that it is cheap and extremely stable. The disadvantage is that it is troublesome to read the data again. For example, you need to find the tape that stores the corresponding data and put it into the reading device, which involves physical operations. Of course, this also has advantages. After all, hackers cannot follow the network cable to pull your tape.
Therefore, in today’s Internet environment, more and more companies are choosing tapes to store data. This is why Fujifilm continues to invest in the development of tapes with larger capacity and better performance. For example, the 40TB version released this time can provide a reading speed of 400MB/sec.
Specifically, the Fujifilm 40TB LTO-10 tape provides a native transfer rate of up to 400MB/sec and a compressed transfer data of up to 1000MB/sec. It comes with a built-in EEPROM tape memory with a 32kB electromagnetic induction chip and can store up to 100TB of data through compression (2.5:1 compression ratio).
The physical part of the tape uses improved magnetic particle materials and a thinner base film structure, which allows the storage capacity to be larger in the same volume. The 40TB LTO-10 is 12.65 mm wide, 4 microns thick, and 1337 meters long.
In terms of compatibility, the 40TB version is still compatible with existing read-write devices. For example, read-write devices using LTO-10 can also directly use 40TB tapes, which can reduce the repeated equipment investment that enterprises need to make when replacing large-capacity tapes.
Fujifilm also continues to emphasize the main advantages of tape storage, such as better durability and very stable read and write performance, and lower environmental requirements than ordinary data centers. More importantly, the unit price of tape storage is much lower than mechanical hard drives and solid-state drives.
Therefore, combining the respective advantages and disadvantages of tape storage, mechanical hard disks and solid-state hard drives, the best combination is actually to use tape storage with hard disks, that is, data that does not need to be read frequently is stored in tapes for cold storage, data that needs to be read frequently is placed in solid-state hard drives, and data that is read with medium frequency is placed in mechanical hard disks.
Industry shipment data also shows that current LTO and other types of tape storage applications are continuing to grow, which is mainly driven by AI data retention and compliance regulations. This trend will not change in the short term, and will even drive the continued development of tape storage in the future.