Seagate Wants to Kill Tape

Seagate Technology plc announced a partnership with Tape Ark, enabling businesses to migrate tape-archived data to the cloud using secure and proven processes.

Thus, valuable latent data can be restored, preserved and once again made instantly accessible. Seagate’s Lyve Data Services, powered by Tape Ark, will be moving these legacy data archives online, bringing massive datasets back to life, thereby extracting value and enabling businesses to mine their data for insights.

According to Tape Ark’s research, there are estimated to be over one billion tapes stored in physical offsite locations. Much of this data is at risk, not easily accessible, and may suffer from decay, deterioration and even permanent loss. Activating and analyzing the data stored on tape archives, some of which is decades-old, can be of high value to both public and private organizations.

“With Seagate’s expertise, zettabytes of data can be migrated to cloud platforms. On a global scale, using new edge hardware solutions, we will securely transport the data enabling businesses to recover, access, index, and analyze their tape-stored archived data,” said Paul Steele, senior director of Seagate’s Lyve data services. “By moving this data to the cloud, previously inaccessible data can be put to work using technologies such as AI, industry 4.0 and other analytical tools.”

This partnership enables organizations from all industries to regain access to their data, potentially turning a stagnant cost center into a valuable business asset. Once data is liberated and ingested into the public cloud it becomes available to the application of data analytics thus empowering companies to exploit the inherent potential and worth of previously inaccessible data.

“Our vision is to give client data back to the client and make it instantly and economically accessible to them where and when they want it,” said Guy Holmes, Tape Ark founder and CEO. “Ingesting these data sets into the cloud puts them back in control of their data assets and potentially turns an inaccessible, decaying cost center into a valuable revenue stream.”

Additional information on the partnership

Comments

Seagate's Lyve Data Services and Tape Ark have teamed up to deliver a service that will free the data trapped in tape vaults, a process to migrate high volumes of data from aging, archived tape media (eventually in libraries) in about all legacy tape formats to public cloud platforms such as AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure.

Tape Ark has developed proprietary technology to free data trapped within a maze of data formats, file systems, and legacy tape formats, as well as tapes that are decades old.

The solution supports about all new and old half-inch and cartridge tapes, removable and optical disks, flash disks and video formats, with any software version.

Benefits includes:
• A single point of access to all legacy data.
• Direct online access to zettabytes of data collections; deployment of analytics, data mining, AI and other big data tools previously not possible when tapes were in a vault.
• Access to data within hours of request, instead of days (no more picking data, courier vans or restoring tapes).
• The ability to address media in the cloud as 'media,' and not a restored version of a historical backup.
• Increased data security and durability.
• Ability to expire media with the click of a button.
• Creation of backup and data replication to additional geographies in the cloud, for disaster recovery.
• Reduced data center footprint and associated running costs.
• No more legacy tapes or tape drives to maintain.
• Eliminates the risk of degradation to tape media.
• Eliminates expensive tape-to-tape data migration projects
• Environmental benefits from reducing vehicles on the road and reduced warehouse air conditioning and electricity.
• The cost of tape migration to cloud is no more than current physical storage costs, while providing massive upside and value.
• Tape Ark’s 'rapid learning' system simplifies re-cataloguing while tapes are transferred; make decisions about retention, de-dupe, re-cataloguing and retiring unneeded datasets confidently.

Tape Ark says cloud storage is cheaper than off-site tape storage, as it was confirmed recently by Backblaze.

It's amazing to see Seagate now trying to kill tapes as it pushed them for a while when it acquired in 1996 for $1 billion Conner Peripherals being in QIC and Travan drives following its acquisition of tape drive manufacturer Archive in 1993.

Read also:
Tape Ark Transferring Tape-Based Data to Cloud
Company based in Perth, Western Australia
2017.08.18 | Press Release