As technology progresses, means to store data also develops. It is of the essence to understand established storage systems and identify their uses to help us make informed decisions. LTO storage, or Linear Tape Open, disks was widely used by many companies when they first came out on the market. It had many advantages over disk storage during its time, which was much more expensive than it is now. Since then, disk manufacturers have tried to compete with the price difference, making it closer to the competition. However, even with modern deduplication methods, the tape’s upfront cost per gigabyte is still lower.
Today, LTO and its variations are progressively revealed as obsolete technology in the era of specialized cloud-based storage solutions. Although tape-based systems might have a slight pricing advantage, they lack the speed, flexibility, and fluidity that today’s data-intensive businesses require. Media companies have historically employed Linear Tape Open (LTO) for long-term archiving and media backup. Companies are now looking at alternatives due to the rising expenses of LTO operation and maintenance and the growing volume of data they produce.
The most critical component of computing systems is evolving at a rapid rate, and this is directly proportional to each company’s responsibility to research the best mode of storage for their organization to give maximum efficiency and the most profit. Cloud storage has swiftly emerged as a preferred choice due to its additional features. Here, we compare LTO vs. cloud storage in-depth, examining the advantages and disadvantages of each type of storage and the steps you can take to ensure your data is accessible, secure, and future-proof as you begin your cloud migration.
What are LTO and Cloud Storage
The powerful, scalable, adaptive open tape format known as Linear Tape Open (LTO) is designed for high capacity and maximum storage density performance. LTO Ultrium is the most popular tape format in history, with over 5.6 million drives, 351,732,245 cartridges, and 370,870 billion GB of media capacity supplied since the first LTO products were made available for purchase.
As an alternative standard to proprietary magnetic tape formats, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Certance (now Quantum Corp.) created the linear tape open (LTO) magnetic tape storage available technology in the late 1990s. Technology for magnetic tape storage has been around for more than 50 years. Even now, the availability and cost of this technology are restricted and somewhat costly, but a better budget-friendly option than super large-scale cloud storage.
As businesses expand, their need for storage grows too. Large media companies found it harder to maintain LTOs for the amount of work they wanted. Cloud storage allows large businesses and individuals to store data in the cloud to be accessed from anywhere and shared with those who have permission. Another option for data backup and off-site recovery is cloud storage. Data is sent over a network, usually the internet, and stored on remote storage systems. It is maintained, managed, backed up, and made accessible to users as part of a cloud storage service model. Users often pay a per-consumption monthly fee for their cloud data storage.
A virtualized storage system with accessible interfaces, almost instant elasticity and scalability, multi-tenancy, and metered resources form the foundation of cloud storage. Data kept in the cloud is organized into logical pools and spread out over various commodity storage systems either on-site or housed in a data center run by a third-party cloud provider.
However, new technology isn’t always the preferred system to use. Depending on organizational needs, if a small firm produces massive amounts of data each, the lower-cost option will always be Linear Tape Open.
