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Month Date, 2007: Hewlett Packard, IBM and Quantum, the three contributing companies to the Linear Tape Open (LTO) format have today announced that over 80 Million LTO tape cartridges and 20 Million LTO tape drives have been shipped.

The milestone comes at an interesting time in the lifecycle for tape, as analysts and drive enthusiasts like to call it a dead format. This latest announcement from HP, IBM and Quantum shows that tape is very much alive and well in the storage marketplace.

“As we look at the hierarchy of storage managed by IT professionals, tape has a solid role in the data center for the foreseeable future” said Sal Capizzi, vice president and senior analyst, Ideas International, Inc.

The announcement is a 30 million cartridge improvement over the last milestone in 2006, and refers to the last seven years since the LTO launch in September 2000. Since its introduction there have been a vast number of improvements to the format, as well as an increased amount of competition from new formats.

"LTO tape products have been strongly embraced by business and government as an essential component of their backup and archiving infrastructure," said Cindy Grossman, Vice President, Tape and Archive Systems, IBM.

LTO and tape in general continues to have vast sums of research dollars poured into it, so it doesn’t seem quite so dead yet.

See IDM’s upcoming September/October issue for a revealing look into the future of Tape technology

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