Oracle recently introduced new innovations in tape storage technology with the twin announcements of the StorageTek T10000D tape drive and the StorageTek Linear Tape File System, Library Edition (LTFS, LE) software. The T10000D delivers world-record 8.5 TB of native capacity per cartridge and native data rates of 252 MB/sec, enabling customers to reduce acquisition costs, meet backup/recovery time objectives and archive SLAs with fewer tape drives, and to scale in excess of 68 exabytes of capacity under a single point of management when deployed in a StorageTek 8500 tape library system. LTFS LE helps make tape storage as easy to use and manage as disk at a lower cost, using the familiar drag-and-drop paradigm.
These announcements add to tapes price, reliability, and portability advantages over disk. As a result, tape is no longer being considered just for traditional backup and recovery, but also for new use cases, such as digital media production workflow and movie preservation in media & entertainment, cold archiving for cloud service providers, and long-term retention of patient records in healthcare. Industry influencers and the media have pronounced a resurgence of tape (follow the links below) and Oracle StorageTek tape solutions are leading the way.