Meet the Next Generation of Tape Technology

The creation of data has seen exponential growth for the past decade forcing IT managers in a number of fields including, media and entertainment, healthcare, video surveillance, research and more to look for cost-effective short- and long-term data storage solutions. With these concerns in mind, this month the LTO Program announced the specifications of the latest LTO Ultrium format, generation 8, which is now available for licensing by media manufacturers.  With unprecedented storage capacity and an impressive feature set, the LTO generation 8 technology will provide customers with a cost-effective storage solution that is both easy-to-use and addresses numerous storage needs.

The new LTO generation 8 specifications will double the tape cartridge capacity from the previous LTO generation 7, with customers now being able to store up to 30TB* of compressed data per cartridge.

LTO generation 8 will continue to support multi-layer security capabilities, including hardware-based encryption and WORM (Write-Once, Read Many) functionality. The partitioning functionality that allows users to present an easy-to-use tape-based file system with LTFS which will be also included in this generation.

HDD Shipments at 103 to 105 Million in 3CQ17, Up 7% to 9% Q/Q

Seasonal Rise in CE and Client Demand Lift HDD Sales - Shipments Climb to 103-105 Million

• 3.5" Desktop/CE HDDs: Total desktop/CE HDD shipments (including 3.5" external HDDs) sales rose slightly in CQ3 to approximately 34 million units.
• 2.5" Mobile/CE HDDs: Healthier back to school PC sales and pre-production of game consoles boost 2.5" HDD volumes. 2.5" mobile and CE HDD volumes totaled approximately 55 million
  units.
• 3.5"/2.5" Enterprise HDDs: Nominal decline in performance enterprise HDD sales were offset by slight increase in capacity enterprise volumes, and total enterprise HDD sales remained at around 15.5 million.