Fujifilm and Sony have settled the lawsuit that prevented the sale of high capacity storage tapes in Australia, and the former company has now released the monster 30TB LTO-8 format into Australia.
As reported by specialist storage news service Blocks and Files, the two companies settled in early August. A cross-licensing deal for disputed patents was struck that led Sony and Fujifilm both firing up production lines for LTO-8 cartridges.
Fujifilm even today announced its product has gone on sale in Australia.
Pricing wasn’t disclosed – that’s a reseller’s decision – but we do know the tapes offer 12TB native capacity, 30TB when data compression is applied and data transfer speeds of up to 750MB/sec.
Whether that’s enough to see LTO fend off archival cloud storage – which has long restore times and imposes significant retrieval costs but has a sticker price starting at $2.00/TB/month – remains to be seen.
But at least one local reseller, tape specialist Stutch Data Services, believes tape has a long and strong future. General Manager Richard Stutchbury was recently quoted by Fujifilm as saying he’s sold “sold significantly more Fujifilm LTO tapes over the last 12 months compared to the 12 months before that. The amount of FUJIFILM LTO tapes we are selling continues to grow and will be even higher in the future.”
Whether that was because he’s stopped selling other manufacturer’s tapes was not revealed, nor was just how “significantly” sales have grown.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
