OVHcloud Cold Archive, Resilient and Long-Term Tape-Based Storage with Affordable Price/GB

OVHcloud announces the general availability of Cold Archive, an archiving solution leveraging 8+4 erasure coding, adding to its growing Public Cloud portfolio of storage offers.

Designed to meet customers’ expectations and scaling needs, Cold Archive tackles the challenge of data growth in public cloud environments year on year.

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Vision for long term storage
Engineered for long-term data retention, Cold Archive is a sustainable storage solution for infrequently accessed data. From data protection to archiving, it is designed for use cases including but not limited to media companies that sit on thousands terabytes of video libraries without the need for continuous access, healthcare companies legally bound to keep their data for decades or companies of all kinds looking to improve resiliency in a multi-cloud scenario with another set of their data in a different location.

Cold Archive addresses storage needs for industry compliance and data conservation of financial or HR records and also a match for businesses that understand their current data has untapped potential. As companies collect more and more data, they might not immediately extract its business value. In the long run, this data might prove valuable in yet to be defined workloads built around AI, analytics or simply with future business endeavors.

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Cold Archive is a cost-effective way to preserve that data. It is equally suited to answer data sovereignty concerns in line with the company’s commitment to providing a trusted cloud, offering users control over their data.

IBM and Atempo at heart of Cold Archive
At the heart of the firm’s storage data centres is IBM Corp.’s hardware tape technology. Leveraging IBM tape readers and library automation, storage data centers can store up to 3EB of data per site with up to 18,000 tapes/library.

”IBM is delighted to work with OVHcloud on this generation of cold storage solutions that leverage our industry-leading tape technology” said Jeff Barber, VP, storage HW sales, IBM

Atempo SAS provides the Miria software solution to manage high density IBM tape libraries assisting in the background with archiving and restoring, in a seamless way for the user.

”We are delighted to work with OVHcloud on this new generation of data archiving solution, delivering a fully integrated solution that is simple, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient. Managing ever-growing amounts of critical data is now compatible with sustainability, thanks to the combined expertise of Atempo and OVHcloud,” said Luc d’Urso, CEO, Atempo.

Resilient infrastructure leveraging storage tapes
Based on a fully resilient architecture spread on 4 dedicated storage data centres, the solution benefits from new select sites built from the ground up by the company’s design office using 100% 3D sketching to further optimize building conception and deployment.

It is an offsite solution that employs tapes where each storage data centre is at least 100km apart and located in France. Totaling 4 storage data centres, Cold Archive is a geo-dispersed storage solution able to withstand the loss of a complete region.

”We are thrilled to launch Cold Archive, leveraging the Group’s talents in various fields to offer a resilient long term storage solution that proves to be sustainable. Furthermore, we are offering a sovereign solution immune to extraterritorial laws. All at an unmatched price on the market,” said Yaniv Fdida, CPO, OVHcloud.

With an average lifespan of more than a decade compared to conventional hard disk drives or SSD, tapes provide additional key benefits such as zero power: once data is written, there’s no actual power for the tape when it’s stored away in the library. This offline state contributes to the overall security of the archive, along with existing data immutability, user policies and data protection measures.

Standardized archiving solution
Cold Archive is addressable through the S3 API. Clients will leverage their existing knowledge, making data migration easier. For improved security, data is encrypted at the object storage bucket level with AES-256 server-side encryption based on customer-provided encryption keys.

Cold Archive provides a trusted and secure long-term storage that scales from terabytes to petabytes of data and beyond, benefiting from an attractive pricing model that includes internal traffic as well as API calls. Supporting industry standard APIs, Cold Archive exposes tape storage solutions to infra as code tools.

Pricing at €0,0013/GB
Cold Archive is available for customers in Europe, Canada and APAC. Combining the longevity and resiliency of tape based solutions with replication of content by erasure coding on 4 data centres, the proposition has a strong performance/price ratio.

Pricing model is set at €0,0013/GB for an archive with a 6 months commitment.