Something I missed at the end of May: troubles in LTO-land. According to The Register, Fujifilm has unleashed some sueballs on Sony, alleging patent infringement, and this is causing supply problems in the USA and elsewhere:
Sony has confirmed to The Register that it is currently not supplying the US market with LTO-8.
The case dates back to 2016 when Fujifilm complained to the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) that Sony was infringing a dozen or so of its tape media patents. The USITC opened investigations and in March last year decided Fujifilm was right and banned Sony from importing tape media, including LTO-7 cartridges, into the USA.
LTO-8 tape media patent lawsuit cripples supply as Sony and Fujifilm face off in court, Chris Mellor, 31 May 2019, The Register
It’s somewhat ironic to hear of this issue within the LTO family given the O stands for Open. While it may be an open tape format, it’s not so open elsewhere.
Mellor goes on to note that both IBM and HPE have advised they’re not supplying LTO-8 media at this point in time as a result of the supply constraints.
The one saving grace for tape these days is the continued capacity increase. It takes longer to do end-to-end reads or writes, the cost-per-GB doesn’t necessarily go down commensurately (and certainly not to start with), and if you’re actually doing comprehensive media management like you should when you use tape, then you’ll know that the advertised shelf life for tape is a joke, given the relatively short lifespan of tape drive lifecycles:
Steven Anastasi, vice president of global media archives and preservation services at Warner Bros., therefore puts the practical lifetime of an LTO cartridge at approximately 7 years. Before that time elapses, you must migrate to a newer generation of LTO because, of course, it takes time to move the data from one format to the next. While LTO data capacities have been steadily doubling, tape speeds have not kept up. The first generation, LTO-1, had a maximum transfer rate of 20 megabytes per second; LTO-7’s top rate is 750 MB/s. Then you need technicians to operate and troubleshoot the equipment and ensure that the migrated data is error free. Migrating a petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of data can take several months, says Anastasi.
The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence, Marty Perlmutter, 28 April 2017, IEEE Spectrum
I’m an old-timer when it comes to backup. I remember the Super-DLT vs LTO format wars, but more importantly, I remember when DLT-IV had a veritable strangle-hold on the backup market (pfft: AIT and other also-rans never had a chance against DLT in the day), and once DLT-IV became ultra-dominant, it also ultra-stagnated. The industry went into paroxysms of frustration waiting for a new and better tape format that would solve the complete lack of innovation that happened with DLT at the time.
Now I wonder — is this a new nexus point?
If your one saving grace is regular capacity increases and you can no longer deliver that, what are you really offering to the market?