According to a press release, IBM have come up with a tape format which is so dense that it’ll fit about 35TB of uncompressed data on it.
Obviously this is a “just in the lab” technology and it’s going to be a while away from hitting the market. It remains, however, a remarkable feat – by comparison LTO-4 manages a “measly” 800 GB of uncompressed data, and the soon to be released LTO-5 manages 1.6TB of uncompressed data.
The critical question of course will remain – how fast will you have to pump data at this beast in order to get it streaming? I’m guessing it will be a seriously high speed. As we continue to see tape getting faster and faster, I’ll continue to say: this is the decade where direct to tape backup models will die, long live tape.