Reasons to migrate to new generations of smart tape from Fujifilm

Tape, which until now was considered a medium for long-term copying or archiving, is beginning to experience a second golden age as a first-class access system alongside new generation LTO systems.

Fujifilm is willing to demonstrate that, despite the opinion of many, tape is not dead in broadcast and corporate environments.

The recording media division of the Japanese multinational continues to develop innovative storage systems on magnetic tape media. In fact, it is the only tape manufacturer that has two own production centers, thus guaranteeing total stability in supply. In addition, three technical service centers provide added value in support for customers, including a personalized telephone service for their customers.

One of the pillars on which the company's recording media area currently bases its activity is LTO technology. For more than a decade, this technology has been proven effective in preserving and protecting critical data in the most demanding business environments. Over the last few years, each new LTO generation has improved reading and writing capacity. For example, the latest generation currently on the market, LTO 7, provides a transfer speed almost twice as fast as LTO 6.

Its large capacity, low price and great portability make tape an option to take into account not only in media, entertainment, post-production and conservation of funds but also in other applications such as digitization of large volumes of data, health, big data, satellite imaging...

World reference

Fuji currently manufactures 60% of the tape drives distributed worldwide. Over the last few years, the materials on which tape manufacturing is based have evolved. Today, Barium Ferrite (BaFe) particles have prevailed over metal particles. Among its advantages, compared to metal particles, stands out the fact that the magnetic properties of Barium Ferrite do not depend on its shape since they are vertically magnetized, achieving greater performance with respect to magnetic particles, no matter how tiny they are. Obviously, high magnetic properties always lead to lower performance losses.

One of the problems that the metal particles dragged was their oxidation with the consequent impact on the reduction of reading and writing performance. In the case of Barium Ferrite technology, since it is an oxide, it does not deteriorate due to oxidation, maintaining maximum performance at all times.

High-capacity tapes that use Barium Ferrite offer not only greater writing speed and data integration compared to a hard drive and older generations of LTO tapes that did not use this material.

With BaFe you can manufacture a tape with 88 times the capacity of an LTO6 tape and more than 146 times that of LTO5, for example.

While waiting for the new generations of LTO to hit the market that will be released in the next three years (up to LTO 10), at this time the use of LTO 7 allows carrying out a backup 2.15 times faster than in LTO 5.

Future proof

One of the aspects that have brought tape back to the forefront among storage options for large volumes of data is its immunity against virus or hacker attacks.

According to some studies, tape would be more reliable than disk since it is more solid, secure and the risk of data loss is more than a hundred times lower than disk.

In terms of capacity, tape is now capable of multiplying the highest existing capacity by 22, while disk has reached its highest storage density.

Additionally, it is faster to restore data from a tape than from a disk using deduplication and the deduplicated data must be “rehydrated” (consuming time and effort…)

ecological footprint

The use of BaFE ensures, on the other hand, a longer useful life of the support. A tape based on this material is guaranteed to have a useful life of over 30 years under normal conditions.

Por otro lado, en lo que respecta al ahorro de espacio y energía, el LTO 7 necesita 2,4 veces menos slots en la librería que el LTO 6 y cuatro veces menos que el LTO 5.

Según un estudio de Clipper Group el disco usa 105 veces más energía que la cinta para una solución de 1PB (con un crecimiento de un 45% en 9 años). La cinta también permite ahorrar más de 34.000 megavatios-hora de electricidad.

Fuerte apuesta por el I+D

Fujifilm, with its head office in Tokyo, is present in 140 countries with 273 subsidiaries where nearly 80,000 professionals work. Without a doubt, one of the strengths that have positioned Fuji at the forefront of technological innovation is its strong commitment to R&D from its more than twenty centers dedicated to research. To give us an idea of the dimension of this effort to constantly create new levels of quality, it should be noted that this year alone, Fujifilm allocates 1.3 billion euros to this item. It is precisely this commitment to R&D that has allowed it to take a giant step in what we could already call the new smart tape...