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TapeArk moves tape libraries to public cloud VTLs for lower cost and higher speed Old tape archives can be migrated to a virtual tape library in the public cloud by TapeArk to provide faster data access and lower costs. TapeArk says this makes decades of tape-held information available for AI analysis and processing: “Your archive is a longitudinal dataset waiting for liberation.” It’s highlighting how this can help pharmaceutical suppliers, saying Almirall had 50 years of research data, 400,000 R&D documents on offline tape. Moving this to Azure made it searchable online. Canada's Ontada migrated 150 million cancer (oncology) documents into Azure. It says tape issues are well-known.You need old tape drives to read legacy tapes and old software possibly as well. The latest LTO-10 tape format has no backward compatibility. Tapes deteriorate and need copying to fresh media; re-silvering. Migrating old tapes to newer formats is a formidable problem with large and long-lived tape archives. So, TapeArk says, do away with the whole mess and migrate to virtual tape libraries (VTLs) and drives in the public cloud. It proposes that they audit (no cost), you ship your entire tape archive to one of its data centers where they identify the tape reels, read the contents into local cache, generate metadata and tags, and then perform a mass public cloud ingest. The old tapes are then returned or tossed away. Its Nexus product is a cloud based platform for the management of legacy tape-based data that allows you to view, analyze and restore data from your legacy tape environments without the need to maintain any physical tape storage, legacy tape hardware, software or data center space at all. You can then reclaim the tape library data center space and use its power and cooling for something else. Tape Ark connects a customer’s existing backup tape application to the virtual tapes. Business customers pay for the service using a SaaS model with no need for capital expenditure (CapEx) for equipment or software, or related operational expenditure (OpEx) for managing and maintaining the legacy environments. The Nexus SaaS service is sold based on the number of physical tapes you have, the volume of data they contain and the number of environments you need to be supported. There are low to no tape entry fees and Nexus is available on multi-year tailored plans. TapeArk suggests that a year of LTO-1 tape vault storage ($0.40+/tape/month) buys abut 4 years of Azure storage ($0.00099/Gb) for an LTO-1 tape, 75 percent less expensive. The Tape Ark services are available globally, with mass ingest facilities located in Australia (Perth), India (New Delhi), the UK (Exeter), USA (Dallas) and Canada (Toronto). Tape Ark also offers mobilization to customer sites for in-house data ingest (subject to connectivity requirements). Learn more by browsing TapeArk’s blog webpages. Bootnote TapeArk was founded in 2017 by Australian Guy C.Holmes. This followed the 2015 acquisition of the oil and gas data management division of his Perth-based SpectrumData company by US based Katalyst Data Management. SpectrumData was an Australian specialist in data storage, management, tape transcription, scanning, migration, and recovery services, focused on the geoscience/oil-and-gas industry and government clients in the Asia-Pacific region. Tape Ark takes a company’s tape collection and copies the data into the public cloud. Tapes are written into the cloud as virtual tapes and are paired with a virtual tape drive that also resides in the cloud. If you need to do a restore, you can use the Tape Ark access portal to load the virtual tape into the virtual tape drive and the restore can be performed without the need for you to maintain any physical tape drives, legacy software licenses or pay for any physical offsite storage of media. The company supports the AWS and Azure clouds. It also works with Google Cloud, Wasabi, Backblaze, and others. Its Nexus SaaS platform and tape migration/virtualization services are designed to run on the customer’s preferred cloud, with explicit support for AWS and Azure environments and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) options in those platforms. TapeArk says its moved >1.3 exabytes of tape data to the public cloud so far in 380 tape-to-cloud projects. Several other suppliers provide public cloud VTLs: AWS Tape Gateway, FalconStor, OpenVTL, and Spectra Logic with Geyser Data TAPAS.
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