You know, I've been talking with a lot of industry folks and I feel many questions about LTO and just what it can do for you today. Like any other technology, tape and the ecosystem around it has morphed and evolved since its introduction at the turn of the century. LTO has also become the cold storage backbone for today's cloud hyperscalers. Many thought that tape wasn't as big as it actually is. They thought they were using something else, but they were willing to trade ease of use for a much higher price point in someone else's data center. Cost savings is one of the foundational pillars of tapebased storage. Tape media and library systems have price points significantly lower than spinning disk SSDs and NVMe layers, especially when you get to largecale storage pools. Not only is that initial cost savings going to count, but the cost to operate is going to end up much lower than other methods of cold storage. The power costs for tape are zero when it's idle, and it's not very high when it's in use. This also in turn lowers the amount of cooling that's needed, giving you energy efficiency and environmental consciousness, all wrapped together in significant utility savings that trim your year-over-year spent. Security is another pillar of tapebased storage from immunable simple configurations with worm write once read many to entire off-site onthe-shelf air gap sets of tape. The fact that when architected for security, tape either cannot be deleted or not even touched by bad actors is a growing need. Cyber security is that growing concern for all industries and tape can provide immunity from ransomware, malware, and provide the needed layer many organizations find is
now an insurance requirement. Tape stored with simple best practices has 30 years of life and up to six times the life expectancy for disk and SSD. Scalability is the third pillar. Qualar has a line of libraries that easily add stack capacity as needed and easily increase performance. Current generations of LTO can hold up to 40 terabytes of raw or 100 terabytes of compressed data. Entire libraries worth of tape can be removed from the hardware and kept on the shelf with simple barcodes that allow very easy retrieval. Increasing your organization's pool of data is simple without having to constantly rearchitect the solution. The configuration of tape can remain the same in your data center, allowing growth to pabyte or exabyte scale with ease, changing generations of tape cartridges without worrying about forklift upgrades of hardware speed. One significant feature in modern LTO is its increased speed with single drives able to reach a sustained 400 megabyte per second uncompressed throughput. So when you combine that with software solutions that can span data over multiple tapes or utilizing a small cache speed to data on tape can increase radically. Ease of use. Tape was always seen as an outlier in many workflows. Thought of as a difficult slow process. The ecosystem of software and controllers around tape has made great strides in making backup and archive simple. A protocol that has been reshaping how various systems access and orchestrate data movement has been the simple storage service known to most as S3. S3 was invented in the cloud and looks at files differently from file systems up to this point. Data is stored as objects, hence it's called object storage and in buckets. It makes for
quite granular access controls. Today, entire library of tape configurations can simply be presented as S3. Once configured, the user software and applications see tape as just another S S3 location and everything simply works in the background. To put a bow on it, tape is much more advanced today than from the time of the introduction of LTO. And we are now at the point of being good, fast, and cheap. Wow, modern LTO breaks the old paradigms. Reach out to us at Qualstar today and get on the road to modern tape libraries that can make you the hero.