LTO-7 Pricing hints start to emerge

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I haven’t understood Oracle StorageTek. Its not compatible with LTO, its a whole new standard, only slightly more dense than LTO-6.
Why?

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Tim Jones]

StorageTek’s high density T10000 devices are a different take on high density than Ultrium and they’ve been around just as long. Much like the Accelis LTO alternate to Ultrium (2 different sides of the LTO-technology face) that IBM promoted until just the past few years. These are aimed at a VERY different customer. They are designed for use in ultra high density environments where a Petabyte is small change. Imagine a room containing 150 Tape drives and supporting 10K tape slots… NOT your average post house :).

But then again, we still have customers managing audio collections on DAT320 DDS drives… Different strokes for different folks.

… oh, and BRU supports them all on everything from the IBM xSeries mainframes to the lowliest ARM-based Raspberry Pi web server :).

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Ju Dor]

Wow that is very expensive
So far, the media were always affordable, as in below 100usd on release, then dropping to 30/50usd within a year.

What’s going on with LTO-7?
Drives, even internal will be mad money and the tapes are hardly worth it, even at 189usd.
Currently, the FUji lto-7 tapes are being advertised by M-Logic at that price, which is significantly less than the IBM pricelist, but grossly overpriced all the same.
If one was looking to invest into a single LTO-7 drive, it would make more sense financially to purchase 2 x LTO-6 drives for the same price, in order to double up the throughput and speed.

Will the price of LTO-7 media eventually drop down to 100usd or 50usd.
If so, how long do you reckon it will take until LTO7 becomes better value than LTO6?

[Tim Jones]

Actually, the media has always been expensive at launch – LTO-6 was $160 per tape for example.

The problem with LTO-7 is the manufacturing process is so exacting that it actually costs over 4 times to manufacture an LTO-7 tape over an LTO-6’s list price.

As I mentioned above, we see LTO-6 remaining as the sweet spot for most shops for quite a few more years. LTO-7 drives might be a good purchase if budgets allow since you can still use LTO-6 media for more reasonable costs since LTO-6’s 2.5TB x 3 tapes = $96 and 7.5TB while a single LTO-7 tape at more than 4x that price is only 6TB.

BTW – BRU is running our current engineering samples at the rated 300MB/sec for M&E data.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Ju Dor]

But that crowd also have listed lto-7 ibm media at 199usd, not the ibm listed 400e
Surely that s going to go down further within a few months right?
https://www.tapeandmedia.com/ibm-lto-7-tape-ultrium-tapes.asp

[Craig Ricker]

WOW! Having had no experience in purchasing LTO systems before, I have been waiting for LTO7 assuming it was going to be priced similarly to LTO 6 + a new technology overhead……. BUT 3-4x the price is astonishing! Its as if the only benefit they’ve brought is server room space.

Hmmm maybe if the drives aernt too out of control pricey, we can pick up 1 of those, and just use LTO6 for now, till the tape prices calm down