70EB of Native Tape Capacity Ships in 2021

Here is an abstract from Trendfocus, Inc.‘s Tape and Archive Storage Service CQ1 ’22 Quarterly Update, published on June 30, 2022

Tape Market Shipments Surge in 2021
Nearly 17EB of native tape capacity ships, jumping 58% and rebounding from a pandemic pause in 2020

2021 Tape Market Results
2021 storage demand for all technologies tracked pointed to surging capacity shipments driven by continued strength in the cloud, combining with recovering enterprise system OEM demand from a corporate spending bounce-back from 2020 pandemic-driven cuts.

After suffering a 5% Y/Y reduction in the prior year, total native tape storage capacity jumped 34% in 2021 to 69.72EB with solid increases in both cloud and on-premises markets.

Shipments to cloud customers increased 58% Y/Y to 18.13EB, now representing 26% of all tape capacity shipped, up from 22% the prior year. Key cloud customers continue solid expansion of tape deployment for archive storage services, but the percentage of capacity shipping to this end market has yet to reach the levels prior to the transition of one large hyperscale company away from tape storage.

Between archive and back-up workloads, the 2021 tape market is now evenly split, with each consuming 50% of the native capacity shipped, or around 35EB. The archive storage opportunities will outpace tape backup growth with the potential for cloud to further accelerate total tape capacity absorption as reflected in the upside forecast.

Not surprisingly, the LTO shipments in 2021 continue to far outpace IBM 3592 with LTO representing around 85% of total native capacity shipped.

Average cartridge capacity across all technologies rose 28% Y/Y to 7TB on a native basis. As a vastly larger market with a diverse customer base, LTO average capacities advanced 1.5TB from 2021. IBM 3592 has not seen a new drive and cartridge density introduction since 2018 and, as a result, average 3592 cartridge capacities remained flat Y/Y.

Native Tape Capacity and Long-Term Forecast, Exabytes
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