The Case for Content Migration on LTO
As we look back upon 2016, the year has seen many worldly events occur (Rio Olympics, Brexit, Zika Virus, Cubs win World Series, LTO-7 hits the streets – among many others!), but its not until you actually sit down and contemplate/calculate how much content you’ve got sitting on all those LTO-5 tapes do you realize that you’ve got some very important work ahead.
As the LTO roadmap moves steadily forward, your timeframe for successfully moving that content onto faster, denser storage is shrinking. With each passing day without a plan, you’ve lost valuable time in the race to complete a job that ultimately never ends – data migration. In case you have not heard, the LTO roadmap provides 2 generations of backwards compatibility (see chart here) – its something you’ve been told I’m sure. But now’s the time to “wake up and smell the coffee” as they say. You need a plan, but why?
1. LTO 7 - Keep your content readily available
If you don’t migrate your content forward, the chances of it not being accessible get higher as time passes and that is a scary thing to think about in today’s age of content re-purposing. Let’s face it, all hardware is prone to failure over time - and if/when the day arrives when your LTO-5 drive no longer works and there is limited ability to source a new one - you are SOL and all the content on those LTO-5 tapes will not be easily accessible. Sure you could go buy yourself a “brand new” LTO 6 drive, but that will only get you so far and with LTO 8 on the horizon, why buy into an intermediate band-aid?
2. LTO 7 - Consolidate content
With LTO 7 firmly established as a cost, performance and capacity leader in today’s storage arena it makes perfect sense to make the move. Doing so will allow you to consolidate all that content from LTO 5 tapes onto roughly one fourth the number of LTO 7 tapes. Imagine the shelf space you could save – ultimately making room for much more content all being written to brand new LTO 7 tapes. You can now hold a single project’s worth of content on a single tape – much easier for organizing as well as distribution.
3. LTO 7 – Save money by taking advantage of higher speeds and greater capacity
LTO 7 capacity per cartridge is 6TB, providing highly reliable storage at just $.02 per GB (read more here), while the increase in speed of LTO 7 drives delivers 300MB/sec throughput. These numbers are hard to ignore – even before that cup of coffee. Not only are you saving money on the actual storage, you will save valuable time (remember time=money) by being able to complete jobs in half the time, or maybe a better way to see it - double your productivity!
The bottom line is that data migration is really important and we at StorageDNA understand the task that lies ahead for many of our customers, so we want you to stay tuned for our upcoming software release which will include great new features to help with your migration tasks.