According to the latest report, hard disk drives (HDDs) gradually replaced traditional tape drives with their faster speed advantages. Then in recent years, solid-state memory (SSD) has gradually replaced HDD for the same reason.
Even so, the open linear tape (LTO) devices introduced in the 1990s have not faded out of the market. Even to a certain extent, tape storage sales have ushered in a surge as ransomware attacks have proliferated.
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Tape storage has never gone away for big data storage companies and is a fairly old storage technology by modern standards. There are tape-based storage systems dating back to the first commercial PCs in the 1950s.
Moreover, Linear tape (LTO) came a little later in the 90s. It’s an open standard for tape storage created by a cross-industry consortium and manufactured today by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum, among others.
2021 will also be a brilliant year for LTO. According to an LTO sales report, using data provided by the companies responsible for making LTO tapes, total tape shipments in 2021 will be 148 exabytes, which is well ahead of the 105 exabytes shipped in 2020, or earlier. A record 2019 volume of 114 exabytes. That said, tape sales in 2021 are up 41% from 2020 and 30% higher than the 2019 record of 114 EB.
What is the reason behind the growth? This is partly due to increased cybersecurity and malware threats, such as ransomware.
“We continue to see enterprises return to tape technology, seeking storage solutions that provide high capacity, reliability, long-term data archiving, and stronger data protection measures, especially as cybersecurity threats soar,” said HPE Storage General Manager and Vice President Patrick Osborne said.
Unless some hacker breaks into a warehouse of tape drives, plugs them all in, and waits a long time to steal all the data on each drive, the data cannot be easily corrupted or copied. Of course, companies cannot now rely on tape drives as the primary backup, more as a secondary or tertiary backup in case something goes horribly wrong.
