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TAPE Tape capacity shipments fell in 2025 but 2026 could be a boom year for tape Shipped tape archive capacity went down 9 percent year-on-year in 2025 as enterprises archived less data, but a great shipment rise could be coming. Data from the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs) – HPE, IBM, and Quantum – shows a large pick-up in the first 2026 quarter, with a 57 percent rise over the first 2025 quarter. Quantum CEO Hugues Meyrath said: “We are seeing unprecedented data growth combined with increasing cost, energy, and cyber resilience pressures across the industry. As organizations adapt to this new reality, tape is increasingly viewed as a strategic component of modern data infrastructure, delivering predictable economics and resilient long-term data retention at scale.” The LTO organization has provided a tape capacity shipped chart in the past, assuming a 2.5:1 compression ratio to big up the numbers. That chart stopped in 2019. It has supplied annual EB shipped numbers for 2020 to 2025 and we constructed a chart with approximately the same dimensions for these years, as we did last year. Then we used a graphics program to position it next to the LTO chart and, voila, here is the result: The 2018 dip was due to a patent dispute between the two tape ribbon manufacturers, Fujifilm and Sony, which restricted the global supply of LTO-8 tape media until a cross-licensing deal was agreed between the two. The 2020 dip was ascribed to the COVID-19 pandemic. As we can see growth rebounded to a 148 EB total the next year but was then pretty much on-existent in 2022 with a modest increase in 2023. The 2024 jump to 176.5 EB was a 15.4 percent increase, and tape system and software vendors felt good about future prospects. Alas, hopes were dashed with a 9.2 percent fall to160.3 TB in 2025. Perhaps buyers were waiting for LTO-10 tape to arrive. Even so, the LTO people said: “Shipped capacity was higher than any other year in history save 2024 itself, indicating structurally high demand for tape solutions.” Certainly compared to the situation before 2021 but 2024’s peak 176.5 EB number could be an outlier and not an indication of things to come. However the Q1 2026 57 percent YY rise brings more hope. Some of that could be due to adoption of the new LTO-10 format, with the remainder due to a need to archive more data. We looked at old LTO cartridge unit shipment numbers per quarter, from 2008 through to 2011, and found a fairly even 23 percent to 27 percent proportion of annual shipments per quarter, averaging 25 percent a quarter: Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math. Assume Q1 in 2025 represented 25 percent of the 160.3 EB shipped that year; that gives us 40.075 EB. Bump that up 57 percent to get the Q1 2026 number, and we get 62.92 EB shipped. Now multiply that by 4 to get a rough full 2026 EB shipped estimate – 251.67 EB. That’s huge. If, and this is a big if, that comes to pass, then 2026 will be a watershed year for the tape market, with tape ribbon vendors, IBM’s tape drive business, and the tape library system and software vendors all having a very good year.
document fetched 2026-09-05 02:56 · canonical https://blocksandfiles.com/tape/2026/09/04/tape-capacity-shipments-fell-in-2025-but-2026-could-be-a-boom-year-for-tape/5294464