Jun 13, 2019 08:00:00

Large-capacity recording medium 'LTO-8 tape' runs short due to competition among Japanese companies

Linear Tape Open (LTO) is a magnetic tape type recording medium for computers, and is mainly sold to the enterprise for backup and archiving. The latest generation of such LTO is LTO-8 , but when the LTO-8's magnetic tape runs short due to the competition among Japanese companies that dominate the market, Backblaze, which provides cloud storage services, reports .

What to Do about the LTO-8 Tape Shortage
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-survive-the-lto-8-tape-shortage/

In 2017, IBM and other LTO tape drive manufacturers announced a new tape drive compatible with LTO-8. However, according to Backblaze, few people are actually writing data to LTO-8 at the time of writing. The cause is not because many users are not interested in switching from LTO-7 to LTO-8, but simply because 'the remaining two LTO tape makers are fighting patent infringement lawsuits.'

The LTO tape manufacturers that received the previous generation LTO-7 certification are two companies, Fujifilm and Sony , and these two companies have substantially held the manufacturing share of LTO tape. However, in 2016, Fujifilm sued Sony for LTO tape-related patent infringement, and it developed into the situation that Sony counteracts Fujifilm after that.

During this battle, LTO tape drive manufacturers announced a drive compatible with LTO-8, but the United States prohibited import of Fujifilm and Sony LTO tapes until March 2019. At the time of writing, Fujifilm has not manufactured LTO-8 tapes, and Sony has also said that it is unclear when the export of LTO-8 tapes will resume, and even if there is a drive, the situation of LTO-8 tapes themselves is out of stock Is continuing. The fact that the first LTO generation was announced and the number of LTO tape manufacturers that had been six companies in 2000 became two companies has led to a situation where the competition between companies does not result in the product being marketed as it is.

In recent years, with the increasing resolution of movies, professionals working with movie files and audio files need large-capacity data media. As a result, the lack of LTO tapes, which has continued to announce new generations with the goal of doubling capacity in each LTO generation, is a problem for many users.

It is not impossible to keep using the same LTO tape all the time, but LTO tape drives are only compatible up to the previous two generations. As a result, the older LTO tapes will have progressively less drives to read, so users have to migrate data to the latest LTO tapes each time a new generation is announced, says Backblaze.

As a way to eliminate LTO-8 shortage, Backblaze 'Wait for the competition to finish completely before purchasing LTO-8 tape' 'Buy LTO-8 tape drive and use unused LTO-7 tape The proposal was to initialize it to a large-capacity format called '

LTO Type M (M8) ' and make it possible to hold 9TB of data instead of the standard 6TB on a conventional LTO-7 tape.

However, because Backblaze is extremely cumbersome to store large amounts of data, the third option is to 'migrate data to a cloud storage service'. Given the benefits of LTO tapes, such as the ability to store large amounts of data offline, and the time and cost of managing them, it may be best to choose the method that suits you.