Tape Roadmap & Challenges with using New High-Density Tapes

Turguy Göker, Director of Advanced Development LTO at Quantum and a key contributor to the original LTO project reviews the tape technology roadmap (LTO and InSIC) and discusses the challenges of increasing areal density in tape. 

He discusses the challenges of increasing areal density with thinner substrates while meeting interchange requirements and “11 nines” durability expectations. He covers core channel technologies including DSP, two-dimensional Reed-Solomon ECC (C1/C2), RLL, Viterbi detection, servo positioning, and LTO-10’s tilted-head approach. Using large field datasets from LTO-7/8/9, he shows errors are not purely random and often cluster near the beginning/end of tape, limiting single-cartridge reliability to about four nines. 

He then presents Quantum’s two-dimensional erasure coding approach in ActiveScale object storage to improve availability, reduce soft errors, optimize tape motion efficiency, and manage environmental risks, followed by audience Q&A on data collection, interfaces (SAS/Fibre Channel), and thin-tape effects. 

Timestamps: 

• 0:00 Göker introduced
• 1:21 Talk overview: density challenges, 11-nines
• 10:59 Channel tech: ECC, RLL, Viterbi, tilted head
• 21:37 Real-world errors: UBER limits, error types
• 26:09 Field data: BOT/EOT clustering, max 4 nines
• 31:15 Quantum solution: ActiveScale 2D erasure coding
• 34:01 Results: soft errors down, >90% tape efficiency
• 39:04 Environmental risks & monitoring
• 40:42 Erasure coding demo: damaged tape recovered
• 43:24 Q&A: data collection, interfaces, thin tape