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Originally developed in the late 1990s, LTO (Linear Tape Open) is a magnetic tape data storage technology that offers extensive storage for a variety of applications comprising, long-term archive, data back-up, high-capacity data transfer, and offline storage almost over the past two decades. The LTO technology has shown vast up gradation with new features added to its subsequent generations (1 – 8) including write-once, read-many (WORM); data encryption; and partitioning to enable a Linear Tape File System (LTFS) that aids in enhancing its overall performance in terms of storage capacity, speed, data transfer rate (MBps), digital encoding methods and compression techniques.
An overview of the LTO generations is depicted hereunder:
| LTO Type | Year of Introduction | Generation | Native Capacity | Compressed Capacity | Compression Ratio | Data Native Transfer Rate | Compressed Data Transfer Rate |
LTO-1 | 2000 | 1 | 100 GB | up to 200 GB | 2:1 | 20 MBps | 40 MBps |
LTO-2 | 2003 | 2 | 200 GB | 400 GB | 2:1 | 40 MBPS | 80 MBPS |
LTO-3 | Late 2004 | 3 | 400 GB | 800 GB | 2:1 | 80 MBPS | 160 MBPS |
LTO-4 | 2007 | 4 | 800 GB | 1.6 TB | 2:1 | 120 MBPS | 240 MBPS |
LTO-5 | 2010 | 5 | 1.5 TB | 3 TB | 2:1 | 140 MBPS | 280 MBPS |
LTO-6 | 2012 | 6 | 2.5 TB | 6.25 TB | 2.5:1 | 160 MBPS | 400 MBPS |
| LTO-7 | 2015 | 7 | 6 TB | 15 TB | 2.5:1 | 300 MBPS | 700 MBPS |
LTO-8 | 2017 | 8 | 12 TB | 30 TB | 2.5:1 | 360 MBPS | 750 MBPS |
Pros:
Storage Capacity & Costs
Archival on LTO for industries dealing with huge data size costs cheaper & effective as compared to storage on internal hard drives. The LTO Data Archival has shown rapid growth in sectors like media, entertainment, data analytics, science where there is a continuous flow of data throughout the operations. With the advent of the latest generation LTO-8 (as depicted above), one can store 12TB of uncompressed data @360 MBPS data transfer rate and 30TB of uncompressed data @ 750 MBPS on a single taped costing about $100.
Life Span/Durability
The LTO cartridges offer extensive lifespan with an average cycle of 30 years along with high-end backup & recovery throughout its life cycle.
Data Mobility
Transferring voluminous data through networks is an expensive & time-consuming process and may also lead to data crash /corruption in cases of any link or interoperability failures. Also, there are probabilities of unauthorized data access over the internet acting as a great threat towards the confidentiality of data.
LTO, on the other hand, provides an easy & rational means of data exchange physically over tape from one location to another.
Technology Upgrade
The LTO technology has shown remarkable growth since years with new releases every 2 to 3 years highlighting expansion in storage capability, increased data transfer rate & advancement of data compression & encryption solutions.
The LTO Program group has laid a product timeline with new releases up to LTO-12 delivering incremented storage capacity and performance growth.
Disaster Recovery
As backup data stored on LTO are preserved offline, the data is safe from any sort of virus attacks or malware and whole data can be restored as per necessity & requirements.
Cons:
Operational costs
The overall operational cost in Tape based archival is comparatively high as the cost of LTO drives that are used for digital recording in order to store data on magnetic tapes, range from $2000-$3500 and that may rise up for enterprise versions.
Keeping up with the technology
LTO1 was introduced in the year 2000, 12 years later LTO 6 was introduced, so a new version every second year. Typically what happens is that LTO’s are migrated every second generation since the writer and the reader only support 2 or 3 generations of tapes. If we record on LTO 6 and leave it on the shelf for 60 years there will for the guarantee not be a reading device available and with a very high probability, most of the data will be gone.
Tapes are not random access like hard drives
The LTO drive that does a digital recording of data on magnetic tape is only capable of moving tape in a single direction. As such, only sequential access storage can be possible in tapes. This adversely affects the speed of storage & retrieval of data due to its constraints of linear technology.
Due to limitations of linear technology, if new data is inserted/existing data modified in between leads to erasure of data beyond the point of insertion or modification. Data has to be necessarily added to tape right from the point of last written sector to avoid any deletion of existing data. This sometimes leads to data replication and also minimizes the optimal use of storage space of LTO tapes.
Whether LTO and LTFS are optimum for storage depends on the amount of data that need to be archived and also their frequency of access by end users. There is no doubt that LTO is an ideal media for the offline preservation and protection of data for completed projects. LTO’s exclusive features make it too competent for long-term data retention and content archive applications.
LTO-tape data backup seems to be more consistent, durable, and cost-efficient for data archiving in long-term supported by an offsite tape vaulting service.
LTO Tapes serve as a better option for archiving huge amount of data in long-term especially for those industries that produce a substantial amount of data all through its lifecycle as media, entertainment, survey, medical records, verdict, library etc.
Whereas in-house disk system-or even cloud storage-can work efficiently for data that needs to be accessed frequently under low access latencies. Also, the ability for random access & modifications of existing data stored in disk minimizes the chances of data replication.
MediaGuru is a Global Services Company offering end-to-end solutions in the area of content digitization and preservation, turnkey technology projects and digital media from our offices in UAE, Singapore, South Africa and India.