Tape in the cloud—Technology developments and roadmaps supporting 80 TB cartridge capacities

Tape, which is the storage of magnetic bits on flexible 0.5” wide media, provides critical data storage needs for the Cloud as evidenced by continued growth in exabyte shipments of tape products. This paper outlines the present storage landscape environment for tape, HDD, and NAND flash, describes the tape roadmap for capacity improvements, and presents recording data on narrow track, 32 channel, TMR tape heads spanning read sensor widths from 1.0 μm to 0.20 μm illustrating the potential for 80 TB cartridge operation. Critically, future improvements in tape areal density and tape cartridge capacity are expected to be achieved from evolutionary developments in head/media technology, not requiring revolutionary developments, such as energy assisted magnetic recording technologies required by HDD strategies.