http://www.lto.org/2017/04/the-lto-program-continues-to-break-year-over-year-records-in-total-tape-capacity-shipped/

it shows a steady decline of tape shipments while the amount of Exabytes shipped still increases. The assumed compression ratio is 2.5, thus about 10 Exabytes are shipped per quarter which has to be compared with ~150 Exabytes for HDDs.

• LTO_units_quarter_Apr2017.JPG:
  

• LTO_exabytes_quarter_Apr2017.JPG:
  

During the first quarter Oracle announced that they are stopping their complete enterprise tape line, another version of the T10k was expected to be released in Q2 2017, but is now cancelled. While IBM just (May 2017) announced their next enterprise tape version (TS1150) with 15 TB uncompressed capacity). The new LTO-8 drive with an uncompressed capacity of 12 TB is expected at the end of 2017.

• spectra_general_tape_roadmap_May2017.JPG:
  

http://hpc.csiro.au/users/dmfug/Meeting_Feb2017/Presentations/Spectra_Logic_Presentation.pdf

Now all tape drive heads for LTO and IBM enterprise are produced by IBM only, about 230 thousand in 2016 compared to ~500 thousand in 2014.

The future of tapes ???

The IBM storage group shows since years a constant decrease in revenues and IBM has sold several 'hardware' parts during the last years (PCs, servers, foundry, etc.)

• ibm_annual_storage_hw_revs_to_2016.jpg:
  

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/19/screech_bm_turns_a_storage_corner/