This blog focuses on two recent announcements. One from the LTO Program about 40TB LTO 14 tapes being available by 2026. The other is Vdura’s recent announcement of its Data Platform V12 software that improves performance and increases capacity using SMR HDDs.
Magnetic tape is an important storage technology supporting most hyperscale data centers and other enterprises. It is the lowest cost storage technology in widespread use today and represents the lowest tier of storage in most organizations. LTO tape is the dominate tape in use although IBM also makes an enterprise tape, currently with capacities up to 50TB per cartridge. The image below shows current Coughlin Associates projections for HDD, SSD and tape annual storage capacity shipments out to 2030.
The LTO Tape Program said that it was increasing the storage capacity of its LTO-10 cartridges to 40TB of native capacity by the first calendar quarter of 2026. The program often refers to the 2.5:1 compressed capacity of its LTO tapes, which would be 100TB for this updated LTO-10 tape.
The Ultrium LTO announcement quotes Stephen Bacon, VP at HPE as saying that, “AI has turned archives into strategic assets. The new 40 TB LTO-10 cartridge will help enterprise-class organizations—across healthcare, financial services, media, research, manufacturing, the public sector and beyond—consolidate petabytes efficiently, strengthen cyber resiliency with true offline air-gapping, and keep long-term retention affordable and sustainable.”
This 33% increased capacity from the 30TB LTO-10 tape announced earlier this year is said to be due to a new Aramid base film, the substrate, that enables a thinner, smoother and longer tape in the same cartridge form factor. Longer tape means more capacity per cartridge. There were also refinements in the drive head design to allow more tape in the cartridge. Existing LTO 10 tape drives will be able to use the new higher capacity tapes.
In addition, the LTO roadmap was adjusted for LTO 11 out to LTO 14, as shown below.
It now peaks with a 913TB compressed capacity, 365TB native capacity, down from earlier LTO 14 generation targets of 576TB native.
Vdura released its software Data Platform V12, featuring its elastic metadata engine, snapshot support and shingled magnetic recording, SMR, hard disk drive optimization. SMR HDDs allow increased storage capacity in hard drives by partially overwriting track on top of each other. Read performance is essentially unchanged, but writing is slower for SMR HDDs compared to conventional HDDs.
Vdura says that, “The Elastic Metadata Engine enables metadata operations to scale linearly across multiple metadata nodes, supporting billions of files and objects under active use. Combined with snapshot and SMR tier support, V12 further reduces total cost of ownership while extending VDURA’s lead in AI-scale storage economics. With aggregate throughput performance increased by more than 20%, V12 delivers unmatched efficiency for training pipelines, inference workloads, and hyperscale data movement.”
The LTO Program announced 40TB LTO-10 tapes by 2026 with an adjusted capacity roadmap out to LTO generation 14. Vdura released a new data platform allowing higher capacity per rack using SMR HDDs.