HPE LTO-9 Ultrium Data Cartridge LTO9 Q2079A

Traditional applications and new workloads powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI & ML), are creating astonishing amounts of information that organizations are either reluctant to erase data or are prevented from doing so by compliance requirements. A recent study estimates that by 2030, organizations will need to manage 35 zettabytes of installed storage capacity, the overwhelming majority of which will be cold or frozen data (Source: Further Research, 2023). This represents a sixfold increase over the volume of data being managed in 2023.

HPE believes the value of tape can be summarized through four key pillars: scalability, security, savings and sustainability.

- Scalability - Against the background of relentless data growth detailed by analysts, the 14 generation LTO roadmap is projecting tape media capacities will scale to 1.4 PB per cartridge over the coming decade, which makes HPE Storage tape technology the ideal, ultra-dense, cold data storage platform of the future.

- Security - The most compelling reason for the continued strategic value of HPE Storage Tape is the rising threat of ransomware. A recent study revealed that the most significant factor in compromised backups was "insufficient air gap" (39%), followed by "backups were not encrypted" (28%), and "backups were not immutable" (22%) (source: IDC, 2025). For companies concerned about building stronger cybersecurity defences, HPE LTO tape technology allows them to follow the best practice advice of government agencies, such as the US FBI, UK National Cyber Security Centre, German Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, to keep backup and archive data offline. Tape is the only storage technology that is offline by design, enabling businesses to keep copies of their data behind a physical air gap that ransomware cannot breach.

- Savings - Although utilising the cloud for some of this cold and frozen data will certainly be an option, with global data creation and replication expected to experience a compound annual growth rate of between 30-40% out to 2030 (source: Further Research, 2023), the cost of retrieving even a fraction of that data regularly from a cloud provider could be prohibitive. Recognizing the inevitability of data recall and retrieval from deep archives, LTO tape technology has a measurable Return on Investment of up to 1856% when compared to cloud storage (source: Solutions North, 2023). And now that LTO technology supports S3 access via RESTful APIs, tape can be directly integrated with on-premises and off-prem storage environments to expand the data available to any capacity intensive workload.

- Sustainability - HPE Storage Tape offers ultra-low carbon footprint per terabyte of data stored, per day, which gives organizations a powerful reason for including it in future data centre architectures. Tape, once out of the system, consumes no power to store the data. This is important not just to IT groups, but also to the whole organisation as sustainability goals are increasingly being written into corporate and executive objectives.

Backed by an uncompromising media qualification process, HPE Storage LTO Ultrium data cartridges support all HPE Storage and non-HPE Storage LTO Ultrium tape devices. The latest tenth generation products minimize interruption to network and SAN backup by being capable of protecting 1.44 TB /hour (full height drives only) of data at native speeds and storing up to 30 TB native (75 TB assuming 2.5:1 compression) on one piece of media (1100% greater capacity than HPE Storage LTO-6 Ultrium tapes).