We sat down with Doug Williams, Qualstar's Channel Alliance and Regional Sales Manager for UK, Ireland and the Caribbean, to talk about the quiet resurgence of tape storage why energy costs, cloud egress bills and ransomware are all pointing enterprises back to a technology they wrote off a decade ago.
Doug Williams joined the IT industry in 1985, starting as an engineer before moving into sales. His first products were protocol converters third-party IBM 5250 screens and printers that offered an affordable alternative to IBM's own hardware at a time when leasing dominated the market. Forty years later, the fundamental principle hasn't changed: give customers more flexibility and better value than the incumbent.
His recent career highlight before joining Qualstar was migrating 42 casinos from VMware to Scale Computing hyper-converged infrastructure a project that won an infrastructure of the year award. He joined Qualstar in May, with a remit covering UK and Ireland that has since expanded to include the Caribbean and most of the world outside the US and the DACH region.
Qualstar itself has been manufacturing tape libraries for 42 years, using IBM LTO drives throughout. With manufacturing operations in both the US and Poland, they can ship to UK and European customers within 5 to 10 days from the Polish facility and sidestep the tariff complications currently affecting US-manufactured technology.
The "tape is dead" narrative has been a recurring feature of the storage industry for decades. Doug has heard it throughout his career. His view is that the conversation has decisively shifted — and the resurgence is accelerating rather than levelling off.
Two forces are driving it. The first is energy cost. Tape consumes power only when a cartridge is physically loaded into a drive. The vast majority of data sitting in a tape library costs almost nothing to store from an energy perspective. Compare that with spinning disk, where Doug notes that around 80% of data on active disk storage is rarely or never accessed — yet continues to consume power continuously.
The second force is cloud economics. Organisations that moved data to cloud storage have discovered that while ingesting data is often cheap, getting it back out egress costs is anything but. As those bills have grown, the case for keeping cold and archival data on-premise tape has become increasingly compelling.
Beyond economics, there is a security argument for tape that has become increasingly urgent as ransomware attacks have grown in scale and sophistication. It is, in Doug's words, the biggest selling point: tape that is offline simply cannot be hacked.
An offline tape cartridge sitting in a library slot is physically disconnected from any network. There is no pathway for a ransomware attack to reach it, encrypt it, or exfiltrate it. This is the air gap and it is a property that no cloud storage solution, however well secured, can replicate. Cloud storage is, by definition, accessible over a network.
An air gap refers to a complete physical separation between a storage system and any network connection. Data on an offline tape cartridge cannot be accessed remotely not by ransomware, not by external attackers, not by anyone without physical access to the library.
Nearline tape where cartridges are stored in a library but only loaded into drives on demand offers a practical middle ground: data is accessible through software but remains physically isolated when not in active use. Doug recommends nearline or offline rather than online tape, specifically because of the security benefits this separation provides.
LTO tape also supports encryption, either within the ISV backup software or at the drive level, adding a further layer of protection.
LTO-10 is the current generation of the Linear Tape-Open format. The headline numbers are a significant step up from LTO-9, but the format has had a difficult launch and Doug is candid about the challenges alongside the genuine improvements.
LTO-10 standard cartridge native capacity up from 18TB on LTO-9
LTO-10 enterprise extended cartridge native capacity
LTO-10 is not backwards compatible with previous LTO generations. This is a meaningful practical consideration for organisations with existing tape estates. The reason is technical: to achieve the increased capacity, LTO-10 uses a zigzag head design rather than the straight linear track used by earlier generations. The two approaches are fundamentally incompatible at a physical level a Qualstar library can mix LTO-10 and LTO-9 media, but an LTO-10 drive cannot read LTO-9 cartridges.
The other significant limitation of LTO-10 is that it is currently only available in full height drives. Half height drives, which are smaller and can be fitted into a wider range of library configurations, are not yet available for LTO-10. Doug expects a half height LTO-10 drive at best a year away and is uncertain it will ever arrive, given the engineering challenge of compacting the zigzag head mechanism into a smaller form factor.
Qualstar's libraries can mix full height and half height drives, which gives customers more flexibility during the transition period. But the full-height-only constraint has been one of the factors behind what Doug describes as an extremely slow uptake of LTO-10 since its launch.
Both LTO-9 and LTO-10 transfer data at 400MB per second per drive. Doug is direct about why this is unlikely to increase: beyond this speed, the tape itself snaps. Short of a fundamental change in how tape physically moves through a drive, 400MB/s is where the format sits for the foreseeable future. Organisations with very high throughput requirements need to scale by adding drives rather than expecting individual drive speeds to increase.
Doug notes that LTO-10's market uptake has been hampered by a compatibility issue that required the format to go back to the drawing board. This delayed availability and damaged early momentum. Combined with the full-height-only limitation and the backwards compatibility break, LTO-10 has taken longer than previous generations to gain traction — though Doug expects adoption to accelerate as capacity needs grow and the storage drought deepens.
Founded
42 years of tape library manufacturing
Drives
IBM LTO throughout the range
Product Manager
Patrick Kay, IBM
Manufacturing
US and Poland · 5–10 day UK/EU delivery from Poland
UK contact
Doug Williams, Channel Alliance & RSM
Coverage
UK, Ireland, Caribbean and international (ex-US, ex-DACH
Support
3 years standard · extendable to 5–7 years · on-site available
Slot licensing
Standard capacity
30TB native per cartridge
Enterprise extended
40TB native per cartridge
LTO-9 comparison
18TB native — LTO-10 is a significant step up
Transfer speed
400MB/s per drive (same as LTO-9)
Drive form factor
Full height only - half height TBC
Backwards compatibility
Not compatible with previous LTO generations
Encryption
Talk to Fortuna Data about Qualstar tape libraries and LTO solutions for your organisation.
Qualstar makes tape libraries across a wide range of scales, from desktop units for smaller organisations to multi-cabinet enterprise systems capable of holding hundreds of petabytes. One differentiator Doug is particularly clear about: Qualstar does not charge for slot enablement. Unlike some manufacturers who ship libraries with a portion of slots disabled and charge to unlock them, every slot in a Qualstar library is available from day one.
| Model | Slots | Drives | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop (standalone) | N/A | 1 | SAS connectivity · USB/Thunderbolt options under development |
| Q8 | 8 | 1 (half height) | Entry-level rackmount library |
| Q24 | 24 | 2 (half height) | 2U · Gen2 with full height drive support pending confirmation |
| Q40 | 40 base · up to 640 | 4 per unit · 1× LTO-10 full height + half height mix | Expandable by daisy-chaining additional 40-slot units |
| Q88 | Up to 580 | 2 full height + 2 half height per unit | Mid-range enterprise library |
| Q1000+ | 1,115 per cabinet | Multiple · daisy-chainable | Requires archiving software · S3-to-tape capable |
All Qualstar libraries ship with three years of standard support included, extendable to five or seven years. On-site support is available as an upgrade, delivered through Qualstar's field service partner network. The process is straightforward: a customer calls Qualstar, the fault is diagnosed remotely, and if a part is required it is dispatched for next-day arrival. All components are field replacement units — Doug describes the repair process as "thumbscrews and pull it out and plug a new one in."
Qualstar is deliberately lean as an organisation. When you call support, Doug is clear: you speak to a human, not a bot. For a product category where a library fault has a direct impact on backup and recovery operations, that matters.
One of the more interesting market developments Doug discusses is the growing interest from managed service providers in building tape-based archive services. The model they're following — whether they know it or not — is Amazon Glacier, which is itself built on tape libraries. MSPs are recognising that offering cold storage and archive as a managed service, backed by tape, replicates what the hyperscalers do at a fraction of the cost and with the added benefit of local data sovereignty.
Doug also mentions a recent data centre organisation with several hundred data centres that has committed to tape across their estate — driven primarily by energy consumption. At that scale, the energy savings from replacing spinning disk with tape for cold and archival data are substantial.
Doug expects LTO-11 to follow the established pattern — higher capacity, with the same format constraints. On timeline, he is cautious: he believes it could be five years or more before LTO-11 arrives, and the backwards compatibility break with LTO-10 means organisations will need to plan their media estates carefully.
The more intriguing development he mentions is holographic tape — a technology currently at prototype stage from a manufacturer he doesn't name. The prototype fits within a standard LTO form factor and uses lasers rather than magnetic heads. Early predictions suggest 300TB per cartridge on a half-inch tape. It is desktop-only at this stage and some way from commercial availability, but if the predictions hold, it would represent a fundamental step change in the economics of cold storage.
On the broader question of whether tape will continue to be used, Doug's answer is unambiguous. With the storage drought — a shortage of storage capacity Doug expects to worsen significantly over the next 18 months to two years — and with data volumes continuing to accelerate, the economics of keeping inactive data on spinning disk or in cloud storage will come under increasing pressure. At 40TB per cartridge for LTO-10, hundreds of petabytes in a relatively small rack footprint, and energy consumption that is a fraction of spinning disk, tape's position is stronger than it has been for years.
