Wow Gen14. Sheesh hope I get the chance to use it before I retire.

Gen14 will take…. no idea - 10 - 12 years. It took from 2010 to 2021 from Generation 5 to Generation 9...

Well if it takes 12 I will have 5 years to play with it.

Over 1PB per tape… that’s absolutely insane! It’s a shame there’s no years stamped against this roadmap, but it’s exciting to see the life we still have left in tape! People have well over a decade to keep telling us tape is gonna die, and we have this roadmap to reply with!

People are telling tape is dead for 30 years or more now… the same with mainframes…

There will be still usecases for this for a long time.  It's not useful everywhere and not as the only storage without disk and object…

Tapes are still (and will be for a long time) a pretty solid solution against some threats.. and nearly the only solution for “real offsite”.
I think the roadmap is more or less “subject to be changed” because LTO9 was also planed with 24TB capacity and now there is a compromise between costs and capacity; this can happen again.

We are now moving to LTO9 (from 6) and I am locking forward to it.

Yes, moving from LTO-6 to LTO-9 is the next step at two customers of mine, too

With this their tape libraries are still sufficient and have not to be extended with more frames for a longer time...

Tape will never die.

offsite tapes are all well and good …..but how many people have either a) tested restores or b) actually had to restore in anger, 2-3 years down the line?

100% Craig. Everyone has a story of tape letting them down.

Sometime I should tell everyone the 5 reasons I hate tape.

sounds like a good blog post in the making @Rick Vanover 

Geez...I deployed a Gen7 drive using Gen6 tapes earlier this year.  I don’t have clients with anything NEAR gen 14.  My client with the largest dataset is going to be near the 10/11 area, but they’re not needing to do tape.

I have a client that I deployed tape to this summer.  Next week I’m going to be replacing their SAN (and upgraded their NAS’s that are used as Veeam Repo’s), but before we pull out the old SAN, they had this crazy/not so crazy idea to do a full restore of all VM’s from the tape to the old SAN to verify all is well.  

Wait the 10 years until we are at Gen14…

10 years ago the data amount we have today was not imaginable, too….

There is a new article about LTO tape on BlocksAndFiles with some information why the capacity was decreased for LTO Gen 9.

“A person close to LTO said the truth about the LTO-9 capacity reduction “was just to keep the retrocompatibility.” The explanation is this: “It was 100 percent due to technical issues, mainly the track control system.”

If we want to add data tracks (like lines on a vinyl disk), we need to improve the data track control system (which is in charge of keeping the head “in line”) and thus, decrease or even kill the retrocompatibility as the head will not be able to follow two different track control systems. Thus, there’s a choice; less capacity and keep backward compatibility or more capacity and lose it. For LTO-9, IBM chose to reduce the capacity and keep the retrocompatibility..”

https://blocksandfiles.com/2022/09/07/lto-tape-future/

I have two lto8 lib’s running full bore about 24h a day.   This excites me but my gosh, that is a LOT of data. 

Data streams will need to be added or sped up significantly. My biggest gripe with lto8 is when you have a VM that spans a few tapes how long a single backup or restore gets. I’d much rather write it to several tapes at once. 

Yes, I agree.
I know about the planned transfer rate for generation 10 only and it is planned to be increased from 400 MB/sec with Gen9 to 1100 MB/sec with Gen10. So, the transfer rate will increase definitely (BTW: Gen1 had 20MB/sec...)

If you keep your backup chains short not that much tapes should be used for a single VM…. And for backup-to-tape you can use more than one tape in parallel….

I do use multiple tapes at once if the job is backing up several VM’s.   What happens is if a person has lets say 1 monster VM of 80TB, the other jobs will finish and then it will run on one tape for a few days.  While the Speed of LTO8 is quite good,  the data sizes keep increasing to a point that it’s going to take days/weeks to restore VM’s. 

That 576TB or 1440TB compressed off one sequential tape is going to be something.   you need a 1.4PB landing/staging area for it haha.

The fiber infrastructure alone is going to get pretty expensive to have to keep up with that. Either way I’m excited for it. 

Yes LTO-8 is 5 years old now. Data rate and tape size of LTO-8 do not keep up with the data amount increase we are seeing at the moment.

LTO-14 is at least 10 years in the future. Until then a 1,5 PB staging area is probably a joke… 
What had you said in the year 2000 (when LTO-1 was new) to the needed 18 - 45 TB staging area for LTO-9? It was just not imaginable…. At this time the 100 - 200 GB of LTO-1 were huge….

True, but LTO-9 is current and still could be faster /larger.  I have VM’s that would already fill a LTO10  or 11 Tape. 

I agree 1.5 PB staging area isn’t reasonable for most, but as someone who has multiple PB of on prem storage it’s not as far off as you think, and not really a joke.  I have 200TB of SSD staging right now from an old decommed SAN I just decided to leave for tape restores and other things where I need a landing area.    It’s off maint so it doesn’t cost me anything and if it dies I never put production / non redundant data to it.

At this point the landscape is changed vastly since 2000.  1.4PB tapes DO seem reasonable and imaginable.  The question is can technology keep up with demand.  If not we will end up going back to multiple frame libraries instead of more dense tapes. 

I am afraid we will see multiple frame libraries with extremely dense tapes. The amount of data will increase further and further...

I was talking about smaller shops. Where they could have the option to go from lto8 to lto10 rather than adding frames.  

LTO 10 isn’t even going to be available until 2024 provided there are no shortages of tapes again.  LTO9 isn’t worth an upgrade  unless you are coming from 6 or 7.  

Data will increase forever, and in places like mine people want to keep it forever.  The backup windows get long and things cost more money. 

Curious when you talk about having a library, how many drives you’re talking about?  I used to manage a Qualstar libarary in a previous role.  It consisted of the library unit with...hard to remember, but I think 8 drives.  I want to say that they were something like LTO5 and LTO6 (could have been LTO4 and LTO5).  It had a turnstile on one side.  We were using Quest NetVault to stage backup data to a SAN and and then it would write off the data from the SAN to the FiberChannel drives in the Qualstar.  Quite the beast.  It eventually got replaced by Dell Avamar/DataDomain and I decommissioned the tape libarary.  My understanding is that the library was something like $1 million when it was purchased.  I’ll have to dig up some pictures if I can find them, but here’s a couple stock photo’s of what it looked like roughly.  It was very cool for it’s time, but was a beast to calibrate if the robot got misaligned with the drives and tape slots.

Nice, how much tapes can it manage?