For years, people have predicted the death of tape. Instead, LTO capacity shipments keep hitting record highs, driven by hyperscale cloud providers, media companies, research institutions and enterprises facing ransomware. Here is why so many organisations still choose LTO tape for backup and archive.
The benefits in brief
- Lowest cost per terabyte of any storage medium
- Air-gapped ransomware protection: offline cartridges cannot be attacked over the network
- Huge capacity: up to 40TB native per LTO-10 cartridge
- Up to 30 years of archive life
- Very low energy use: no power at rest
- Portable: ideal for offsite copies and moving big data sets
- Open standard with a published roadmap
1. Low, predictable cost
Tape offers the lowest cost per terabyte of any storage technology. The media itself is inexpensive, cartridges on a shelf draw no power, and there are no egress or API fees to get your own data back. Costs are predictable: you buy cartridges as you need them, rather than paying a monthly bill that rises with every terabyte you keep. For data that must be kept for years but is rarely read, the total cost of ownership is typically a fraction of disk or public cloud.
2. Protection against ransomware
Modern ransomware goes after backups first. It deletes snapshots, encrypts backup repositories and uses stolen admin credentials to wipe cloud copies. An LTO cartridge that has been ejected from the drive is physically disconnected from every network, so there is nothing for an attacker to reach. Add WORM media for immutability and AES-256 encryption for confidentiality, and you have one of the strongest last lines of defence available. More in ransomware and tape.
3. Capacity and scalability
Businesses in every sector are storing more data: healthcare imaging, financial records, video, sensor data and AI training sets. That includes unstructured data (files, images, audio and video) as well as structured databases. LTO scales easily: a single LTO-10 cartridge holds up to 40TB native, and a tape library grows from terabytes to exabytes by adding cartridges, slots and drives.
4. Reliability and longevity
Modern LTO media has an uncorrected bit error rate of 1 in 1019 bits, several orders of magnitude better than typical hard drives. Cartridges are rated for up to 30 years of archive life in suitable conditions. Tape has no motors or electronics running while stored, so there are fewer things to wear out.
5. Sustainability
Storage is a growing share of data centre energy use. Because tape consumes no power when it is not being read or written, moving cold data from spinning disk to LTO can cut the energy and carbon footprint of that data dramatically. That helps organisations with net-zero commitments and carbon reporting.
6. Portability and data interchange
Moving hundreds of terabytes over a network can take days or weeks. A box of LTO cartridges can move the same data overnight. With LTFS, those cartridges can be read on Windows, macOS or Linux without proprietary software, which is why LTO is standard in film and TV production.
7. Security and compliance
- Hardware AES-256 encryption at full speed
- WORM cartridges for records that must not be altered
- Barcode tracking and audit trails in libraries and backup software
- Offsite storage that is easy to arrange
8. An evolving, open technology
LTO is an open standard backed by HPE, IBM and Quantum, with a published roadmap to LTO-14 at 365TB native per cartridge. Several manufacturers make compatible drives and media, so you are never locked into a single vendor.
Summary
Tape does not replace disk or cloud. It complements them. Use fast storage for active data and quick restores, and use LTO tape for the offline backup copy and the long-term archive, where it is cheaper, safer and greener than the alternatives. Talk to us about where LTO fits in your storage strategy.