Comment Science (Score 2) 284
Working in climate science I can tell you that tape for us isn't going anywhere. Our investment gets larger in it every year, at least monetarily and capacity wise. Several of our groups have growth curves that scale linearly with the output of the supercomputers, meaning our growth is almost exponential. Most of this data is static and doesn't really change once it's been produced, but it does need to be read from time to time. There's no other solution out there that takes little to no power to store, no cooling, and can keep the data for years with minimal loss of integrity. We have data that goes back to the 1940's that we have to keep almost forever, this historical data is hugely important in how we create the models and cannot be lost. So we have to have somewhere to store all that data for the long haul, LTO is the medium of choice because it's vendor agnostic, fast enough, cheap, and large enough to handle what we need it to handle.