The staying power of tape storage in the AI era

Artificial intelligence is transforming everything -- how we work, innovate, compete, and communicate. As organizations build and train AI systems, one challenge consistently rises to the top: managing data and outputs at vast scale.

Training large language models, analyzing video streams, or running simulations across decades of scientific data all require infrastructures that can handle exabytes efficiently and securely. Flash and disk are essential for high-performance tasks, but they aren’t the whole story.

Increasingly, IT leaders are rediscovering that tape storage, often regarded as “legacy infrastructure” is not only relevant but completely indispensable in the age of AI.

Tape technology has been continually advancing, with cutting-edge technology and has evolved into a modern, intelligent, and highly cost-effective solution that aligns with the demands of modern AI workflows.

Data volume, velocity and veracity of AI data explosion

More importantly, the rise of AI is driving an explosion in both the volume and velocity of data. Enterprises everywhere are embracing AI workloads, but the accuracy and trustworthiness of the outputs isn’t always guaranteed. Errors and inconsistencies are common. Organizations need to store and capture more data to ensure more granular results.

Consider this: training a single large language model (LLM) may require hundreds of terabytes to multiple petabytes of data—spanning documents, images, audio files, and vast amounts of unstructured content.

And that’s just one workload. Scientific projects in areas like weather forecasting, particle physics, and genomics generate massive streams of sensor and imaging data, quickly accumulating into exabyte-scale challenges.

The bottom line? AI isn’t just pushing the limits of innovation; it’s pushing the limits of data infrastructure. Organizations that fail to prepare for this tidal wave risk being left behind.

To meet the AI challenge, many organizations must rethink, and rearchitect their traditional storage infrastructures to balance performance, cost, and sustainability at scale.

It is widely understood that storing everything on NVMe or flash is prohibitively expensive. Spinning disk is less expensive but consumes enormous amounts of power.

Public cloud archives like Amazon Glacier are flexible but customers are subject to extraneous fees, vendor lock and unpredictable retrieval times can result in unpleasant surprises.

This is where tape shines. With industry-standard Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, organizations can economically preserve massive datasets for decades, ensuring that historical information stays accessible for future AI initiatives.

For mission critical workloads that do not require transactional performance, tape delivers the ideal combination of affordability, scale, and reliability.

AI regulation and the new demands on storage infrastructure

The next wave of AI regulation is upon us and it’s transforming how organizations approach data storage and infrastructure requirements. Regulatory compliance is emerging from the EU’s AI Act to emerging U.S. state-level rules.

New regulatory compliance will require more than just model oversight, it will demand deep visibility and auditability into output plus the data that trains, informs, and supports AI systems.

Storage infrastructure needs to provide easy, quick, and cost-effective access to the AI training data. Traceability, versioning, and auditable data chains are becoming essential as regulatory requirements intensify.

Organizations must now be able to show where data originated, how it is being used, and how long it will be retained.

This means adopting architectures that support immutable archives, granular access controls, and intelligent lifecycle management. Compliance won’t be optional.

Regulatory compliance will become a core design principle, impacting everything from cloud tiers to on-premises archives.

Organizations that build storage strategies with compliance in mind will not only mitigate risk but also create a trusted foundation.

The evolution of tape: new technological innovations

For the large-scale, self-managed enterprise, tape storage has remained a major component of data protection and data lifecycle management.

Today, the value of LTO tape is becoming evident to a much broader audience and has emerged as the industry-standard with 10 generations of drives and media successfully delivered to market.

Each generation of LTO tape technology has fulfilled a widely published roadmap that delivers increased capacity, performance, and density over the past 25 years.

In the current era of data-hungry AI, LTO-10 represents a major infrastructure upgrade as the world’s most economical and sustainable storage medium capable of exabyte scale in a single system.

New tape adopters who start with LTO-10 gain a highly flexible, scalable, and efficient storage infrastructure, one that delivers exceptional value for decades to come.

LTO-10 introduces several technological innovations that enable greater data density, higher per-cartridge capacities, increased resilience, unrivaled efficiencies and established a foundation to deliver faster performance and additional capacity gains.

Also, LTO-10 represents a completely new and modern design, a robust and extensible foundation on which several future generations will deliver dramatic advancements.

Furthermore, LTO-10 was built with large investments in new electronics, tape path mechanics, recording heads, firmware and software.

The introduction of LTO-10 tape technology marks a watershed moment. It is extremely well positioned to meet the storage and regulatory demands for the AI era for several key reasons:

• Robust capacity: The latest LTO-10 cartridges hold up to 30 TB native (75TB compressed), with the roadmap projecting capacities exceeding 1 PB per cartridge (compressed) in future generations.
• High throughput: Modern drives deliver sustained transfer rates up to 1200 MB/s (compressed) using a new 32 GB interface.
• Security and Encryption: LTO provides multiple security layers with built-in encryption and the ability to provide “air-gapped” storage that is inaccessible to unauthorized personnel.

The result is a storage platform that’s not just viable, but future-ready for the exabyte era of AI.

The future of tape in AI workflows

Looking ahead, tape storage will serve a critical role in AI infrastructure. As AI datasets grow, costs rise, and sustainability becomes a central concern, tape offers a combination of attributes unmatched by any other medium:

• Exabyte scalability for ever-growing datasets
• Energy efficiency for greener AI infrastructure
• Cybersecurity resilience against ransomware
• Lowest total cost of ownership for long-term retention

Tape storage continues to evolve with continued innovation and a well-defined roadmap for future generations promising petabyte tape cartridges and even tighter integration into intelligent data management platforms.

The staying power of tape in the AI era

AI is revolutionizing industries, but it is also placing unprecedented demands on data storage. To keep pace, organizations need solutions that scale affordably, operate sustainably, and protect data with ironclad security.

Tape storage checks every box. With unmatched cost efficiency, an ultra-low energy footprint, and built-in cyber resilience, tape delivers exactly what the AI era requires.

It empowers organizations to maximize the value of their AI workflows whether managing exabyte-scale archives or preserving knowledge for decades - today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

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