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At first glance the figures look impressive: up to 15TB per cartridge is now achievable compared to around 6TB for LTO-6. But some observers have claimed that the announcement focuses too much on the compressed capacities as opposed to the raw ones, arguing that for much real world data it will already have been compressed to such an extent before being sent to tape, that there will be little scope for further reductions in size at that point.

Certainly for file formats such as images, there is a lot of compression applied on creation and during normal workflows to make them more useable. And it may well be the case that some of the users who have the highest demand for more tape storage - i.e. those using large multimedia files rather than databases etc. - may not see quite as much benefit as has been suggested.

But at the same time it should be remembered that this argument does not apply only to tape technologies: pretty much all of the data we process today goes through any number of refinement procedures from its creation to its eventual archiving, much of it transparent to the end user. Getting bogged down in arguments about the exact amount of capacity on LTO-7 cartridges compared to LTO-6 is missing the point, we believe.

As Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst, Data Protection at ESG says in our piece: "LTO-7 further solidifies the modern use case for tape in storage environments. This new generation of tape technology will offer a high level of capacity at a low cost, and with LTFS capabilities, should be considered as a part of any tiered storage management plan."

It is the 'part of a tiered storage management plan' that is key. With more than two times the capacity and nearly twice the speed of LTO-6 - however you choose to measure it - this new technology is intended to support storage administrators managing today's enormous data growth.

David Tyler
david.tyler@btc.co.uk