LTO Archival Solutions: Ensuring Secure Data Preservation

Summary

LTO (Linear Tape Open) is a magnetic tape storage technology developed in the 1990s, evolving through nine generations. It offers cost-effective, high-capacity data storage with long-term durability. LTO is ideal for archiving, backups, and offline storage, with features like encryption and write-once, read-many (WORM). While cost-efficient for large data, it requires sequential access, making it slower than disk alternatives.

Introduction

Originally developed in the late 1990s, LTO (Linear Tape Open) is a magnetic tape data storage technology that offers extensive storage for various applications comprising long-term archive, data back-up, high-capacity data transfer, and offline storage almost over the past two decades.

LTO technology has evolved extensively, with new features added in successive generations (from 1 to 9), including write-once, read-many (WORM), data encryption, and partitioning. These enable a linear tape file system (LTFS) that helps improve its overall performance in terms of storage capacity, speed, data transfer rate (MB/s), and digital encoding methods.

An overview of the LTO generations is depicted here under:

Advantages and Disadvantages of Data Storage on LTO

Advantages:

Storage Capacity & Costs

LTO storage for industries that handle volumes of big data, data storage is less expensive and more efficient than storage on internal hard drives, LTO data storage has seen rapid growth in industries such as media, entertainment, data analysis, and science, where data is continuously transmitted during operations. With the arrival of the latest generation LTO-9 (as shown above), 18 TB of uncompressed data at a data transfer speed of 400 MB/s and 45 TB of compressed data at 1000 MB/s can be stored in a single tape that costs about $130 - $150

Longevity / Durability

The LTO cartridges offer an extended life span with an average cycle of 30 years as well as premium backup and recovery throughout their life cycle.

Data Mobility

Transferring big data over networks is an expensive & time-consuming process and can also lead to data failure /corruption in case of connectivity or interoperability failure. Also, there is a chance of unauthorized data online, which poses a major threat to data privacy.

LTO, on the other hand, provides a straightforward way to physically exchange data on tape from one location to another.

Technology Upgrade

The LTO technology has shown tremendous growth in recent years with new releases every 2 to 3 years highlighting storage capacity expansion, increased data transfer rate, and the advancement of data compression & encryption solutions.

The LTO Program Group has created a product program with new releases up to LTO-12 that provides increased storage capacity and increased performance.

Disaster Recovery

Since the backup data stored in LTO is kept offline, the data is protected from any type of virus or malware attack and all the data can be restored as per requirements.

Disadvantages:

Operational costs

The overall operating cost of tape storage is relatively high since the cost of LTO drives used for digital recording to store data on magnetic tapes ranges from $4000-$6000 and can be increased for enterprise versions.

Keeping up with the technology

LTO1 was introduced in the year 2000, 12 years later LTO 6 was introduced, so a new version is every second year. Typically, what happens is that LTOs are migrated every second generation since the writer and the reader only support 2 or 3 generations of tapes. If we record on LTO 6 and leave it on the shelf for 60 years, there will most likely not be a reading device available, and with a very high probability, most of the data will be lost.

Sequential Access

The LTO drive that performs the digital recording of data on magnetic tape is only capable of moving the tape in one direction. As such, only sequential access storage is possible on tapes. This negatively affects the speed of data storage & retrieval due to the limitations of linear technology.

Due to limitations of linear technology, if new data is inserted or existing data is modified in the meantime, it results in the deletion of data beyond the point of insertion or modification. The data must be necessarily added to tape from the last sector written to avoid any deletion of existing data. The sequential nature means storage space may be left unused or fragmented when data is modified or deleted.

Conclusion

Whether LTO and LTFS are optimal for storage depends on the amount of data that needs to be archived and the frequency of end-user access. There is no doubt that LTO is an ideal medium to protect and store offline data for finished projects. LTO’s proprietary features also make it competent for long-term data retention and content archiving applications.

LTO tapes are a better option for the long-term storage of large amounts of data, especially from industries that produce significant amounts of data throughout the life cycle, such as media, entertainment, research, medical records, verdicts, libraries, etc.

Online disk archival or even cloud storage can work efficiently for data that needs to be frequently accessed, modified, or updated under low-access latencies. Also, the ability for random access & modifications of existing data stored on disk minimizes the chances of data replication.

The choice between LTO (Linear Tape-Open) and online disk archival primarily hinges on three factors: data volume, data usage patterns, and accessibility requirements over time.

Ultimately, LTO suits scenarios where data storage cost, longevity, and security are top priorities. For optimal results, LTO tapes can be used in a hybrid storage strategy, where frequently accessed data resides on online systems, and archival or less-accessed data is stored on tape.

Discover the expertise of MediaGuru, specializing in cutting-edge data archiving with Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology. We leverage best-in-class resources for the deployment of long-term data storage solutions. Our expertise in LTO technology has been successfully implemented by leading media organizations and broadcasters worldwide. This ensures secure data archival and preservation within a robust business environment.