The LTO Show Take
For any storage team wrestling with the tape-vs-disk-vs-cloud question, vendor calculators have always been the wrong starting point — every OEM's math conveniently flatters their product. LTO Show's new TCO Calculator fixes that by surfacing the costs that routinely get buried: power, cooling, scheduled hardware refreshes, and cloud retrieval and egress fees that quietly turn cheap-to-store into expensive-to-access. If you're sizing a multi-year archive or justifying a tape-library refresh to finance, this is the tool you actually want in the room.
The Story
LTO Show has released a free, vendor-neutral Storage TCO Calculator that models the true five-year cost of long-term data storage across on-prem tape, on-prem disk, and cloud. Users enter their own capacity, growth rate, and retrieval pattern; the tool itemizes every cost line — hardware, power, cooling, refresh cycles, and cloud retrieval and egress fees — with all defaults and data sources listed on the page. No signup is required; the calculator is live now at https://tco.ltoshow.com/ltoshow.html. A licensed version is also available for industry partners who want to offer it to their own customers; contact info@ltoshow.com.
Source: LTO Show announcement (ltoshow.com)
Questions or comments? Reach The LTO Show team at info@ltoshow.com.
— The LTO Show Editorial Staff