Tape—as a digital storage medium—has been considered dead throughout your correspondent's 29-year career. But that didn't stop the makers behind the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) standard, which delivered 152.9* exabytes of the stuff last year.
The band is so dead! 152.9 exabytes worth of LTO media shipped in 2023 #sysadmin #servers
HPE, IBM and Quantum are the only three LTO Program Technology Providers, and last week they jointly released The Annual LTO Program Media Shipment Report [PDF] which revealed that 152.9 exabyte figure along with the tidbit that it represents shipment growth of 3, 14 percent compared to 2022.
The three attributed some of this growth to "rapid data generation and the increased infrastructure requirements of hyperscalers and enterprises." Which is good news for tape – if hyperscalers are using it, it likely means demand will continue for the foreseeable future.
Since it's 2024, they also attributed some tape demand to AI, which the trio described as exactly the kind of workload that creates unstructured data and can "cause increases in storage requirements and costs."
