The advent of LTO-9 tape, albeit with a capacity of less than 18TB, means that tape library systems are ripe for the upgrade. Spectra Logic, a well-known provider of tape systems to organizations like McDonalds and NASA, has risen to the challenge with its TFinity Exascale tape library. The library has been upgraded to LTO-9 technology and now offers just over an exabyte of native storage, either 1,000 PB or 1,000,000 TB. To accomplish this, you would need approximately 56,000 disks. 18TB drives (such as the Seagate IronWolf Pro), which would cost around €26 million without a chassis to house them. The storage solution can scale up to 144 drives with an army of robotic arms and has access to 56,400 total LTO locations. At full capacity, you can transfer data at a staggering 207,4TB per hour (57,6GB/s or 461Gbit/s). And that's before you factor in compression, which can improve storage capacity and transfer data by up to 2,5 times. Speeds vary wildly depending on the medium being processed, but anything that isn't video, images, or audio can be easily compressed. Tape is becoming increasingly popular in the lower end of the cloud storage market, where its unique security features (air gap and WORM) and unbeatable price per storage unit make it a very attractive proposition. However, LTO isn't the only tape technology in town that matters; IBM TS11X0 and Oracle T10000X are two competing enterprise tape technologies that can work with LTO in the TFinity Exascale tape library.