FUJIFILM INSIGHTS BLOG

Relentless digital data growth is inevitable as data has become critical to all aspects of human life over the course of the past 30 years. Newly created worldwide digital data is expected to grow at 30% or more annually through 2025 mandating the emergence of an ever smarter and more secure long-term storage infrastructure. Data retention requirements vary widely, but archival data is rapidly piling up. Digital archiving is now a required discipline to comply with government regulations for storing financial, customer, legal and patient information. Most data typically reach archival status in 90 days or less, and archival data is accumulating at over 50% compounded annually.

Many data types are being stored indefinitely anticipating that eventually its potential value might be unlocked. Industry surveys indicate nearly 60% of businesses plan to retain data in some digital format 50 years or more and a growing amount of archival data will never be modified or deleted. For most organizations, facing terabytes, petabytes and even exabytes of archive data for the first time can force the redesign of their entire storage strategy and infrastructure. As businesses, governments, societies, and individuals worldwide increase their dependence on data, archiving and data preservation become a critical practice.

It’s time to develop your game plan! Check out this white paper from Horison Information Strategies to learn more.

The rise of big data, business analytics and stricter compliance regulations necessitate that enterprises retain far more data than ever before. Against this backdrop, disk and cloud-based backup implementations are scaling quickly. In fact, many enterprises are dealing with secondary storage repositories that are ten times larger than their production storage repositories.

Especially for large enterprises with diverse data stores, tiered backup strategies are critical to meeting recovery service level agreements (SLAs) without breaking the bank; not all data is mission-critical to recover immediately in the event of an incident, and thus can live on a less expensive storage media.

As discussed in the video below, tape storage media is often perceived as a viable fit only for archive and long-term retention use cases today, but it can also play an important role in the backup hierarchy.

View the video here.

Read the full Storage Switzerland blog here.

Most storage environments consist of multiple platforms, vendors, and clouds creating a unique set of problems: lack of data visibility to enable tiering that aligns data value & storage costs, data locked in silos each with their own management tools, and complicated data protection.

In this video, Floyd Christofferson, CEO of Strongbox Data Solutions, explains how StrongLink Autonomous Engine™ with Data Insights and analytics quickly, dynamically, & seamlessly automates data movement and storage tiering across platforms, vendors and cloud. Data is managed in real-time to facilitate workflows & collaboration, SLAs and StrongLink Autonomous Engine QoS, while eliminating resource contention issues.

Read more here:

Get the Most Out of Your Isilon with Autonomous Data Management.

When an Isilon cluster fills up, IT is faced with deciding whether to buy more Isilon, move data to another platform, or archive/tier data off the Isilon. The challenge is figuring out how to maximize the value of the existing storage investments and reduce storage costs.

What if you could connect Isilon with other storage types into a cross-platform global namespace while reducing costs and improving business continuity and disaster recovery?

Stronglink automatically migrates data from Isilon to other storage platforms—including tape and public cloud—without interrupting user access and while maximizing the value of your existing storage investments.

Read more here: Solution Brief

In this Storage Switzerland video, Tab Butler, Senior Director of MLB’s Media Management and Post Production talks to storage analyst George Crump about how the MLB Network manages all of its data and why the organization views tape as a vital component of the process:

By Brian Kelly

Have you ever watched a TV show featuring some dangerous activity and the warning comes up “Do not attempt this yourself?” It’s usually good advice and reminds me of an experience I had recently.

I had the pleasure of co-presenting at “The Reel Thing,” a part of the Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference in Portland, Oregon with Steve Kochak from Digital Preservations Laboratories. During my part of our presentation I was able to explain to the audience how an LTO cartridge is made and explained in detail each of the different components in a cartridge and what their functions are.

Steve then had a presentation set up to show how one can disassemble a cartridge and reattach a Leader Pin.  The audience was very excited and curious to see the inner workings of a cartridge and the reattachment of the Leader Pin. During the Q&A part of the presentation, after seeing Steve successfully disassemble and reassemble a cartridge and reattach a Leader Pin, the common theme in the questions being asked was, “can I repair my cartridges myself?”

While the answer in some cases is yes, especially with the correct tools, my advice for the audience was that we do not recommend repairing your cartridges yourselves and that we at FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc. accept returns from customers for analysis and repairs. Our technical support team in our U.S.-based factory just outside of Boston handles the cartridges with special care inside of a clean room environment to make sure that no debris comes into contact with the tape, especially in cases where the cartridge has to be opened. With Leader Pin reattachments, we put the cartridge back through the clamping process to make sure it is done properly. We take extra care of customer returns to ensure protection of the cartridges, as well as the customer data that may be saved on the tape. Performing these repairs yourself could lead to further damage and potentially the loss of data, especially if not done carefully or in the right environment.

So “don’t attempt this yourself” and risk losing your data. Leave your repairs to the professionals, we are more than happy to help!

The magnetic tape data storage industry has withstood numerous challenges from its own past performance, from the HDD industry, and mainly from those who are simply uninformed about the major transformation the tape industry has delivered. Early experience with non-mainframe tape technologies were troublesome and turned many data centers away from using tape in favor of HDDs. Mainframe tape technology was more robust. Many data centers still perceive tape as mired in the world of legacy tape as a result. However, this view is completely out of date.

In this new white paper, Fred Moore, president of Horison Information Strategies, explains why it’s time to take advantage of the many benefits tape can bring to your storage infrastructure.

Read the white paper here.

In a recent Storage Switzerland blog, Lead Analyst George Crump talks about how, because IT is perpetually working to lower both capital and operating expenses associated with backup storage infrastructure, backup workloads are common targets for migration to the cloud. However, this is not necessarily the most effective strategy for optimizing cost efficiencies.

In this video, he talks with IT consultant Brad Johns about why IT organizations should holistically evaluate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their backup storage infrastructure, as opposed to focusing solely on immediate costs such as upfront infrastructure acquisition.

Check out George’s blog for more details:

Considering the Total, Rather than Upfront, Cost of Backup Storage Infrastructure