Optimizing Object Storage with Tape Archiving Software: Executive Q&A with Chris Kehoe, Director of Sales & Marketing

In this executive Q&A, Chris Kehoe, Director of Sales & Marketing, discusses his role at FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A. and how the company’s Object Archive software helps solve a major customer pain point as data continues to grow yet resources and budgets do not.

Q: Tell us about your role as Director of Sales and Marketing for Fujifilm’s Data Management Solutions?

As the Director of Sales and Marketing for Fujifilm’s Data Management Solutions, I’m tasked with bringing Fujifilm’s Object Archive software product to the North American market. This includes implementing a sales and marketing strategy for specific target markets.  My team provides full support for demand generation, sales, and post-sales activities such as installation and support.  There are two major focal points in these roles; the first is building and implementing a focused, market-based approach ensuring our product values intersect the market and customers’ needs.  The second is ensuring the best customer experience while working with Fujifilm products, people, and resellers.  This includes on-the-street sales and engineering readiness and customer support capabilities to ensure a fully capable delivery of exceptional customer satisfaction.

“Object Archive delivers low-cost storage and high reliability for long term data archiving and preservation,” – Chris Kehoe

Q: What are the key features and benefits of Object Archive software?

Object Archive software operates like an on-premise cloud archive service through its simple-to-use S3 API and cross-organization and multi-tenant capabilities.  By leveraging today’s highly advanced data tape, automated tape libraries, and state-of-the-art software, Object Archive delivers low-cost storage and high reliability for long-term data archiving and preservation. This solves a major customer pain point as data continues to grow yet resources and budgets do not.

Q: What is your basic go-to-market strategy and what are your key target markets?

Our basic go-to-market strategy is to sell Object Archive into the North American market through Fujifilm’s VAR channel.  One of our primary targets is the computational science and digital preservation departments inside of the non-profit research, research universities, and government labs. These customers have a critical need to properly classify data and to move that data as it ages and cools to the right storage, at the right time and cost. Object Archive supports that strategy very effectively.

Q: What’s your perspective on tape technology and its future?

Tape technology is uniquely suited as the only technology that has the capability to scale in terms of the capacity that is required to specifically meet the long-term retention needs resulting from the significant projected growth of data.  There is no other solution that can achieve similar cost, performance, and retention metrics. Tape has a significant advantage when it comes to TCO, has plenty of performance for the profile of data that it stores and protects, and a long archival life beyond what is probably needed. Add to that best-in-class reliability and the benefit of the lowest energy-consuming data storage solution available. That’s important at a time when sustainability and climate change are becoming a priority for just about everyone.

Q: What is your perspective on cybercrime and the benefits of air gap?

Air gap is a no brainer for tape systems, since the beginning of its development, tape has been designed and used to manage and protect data against online and physical threats and disasters. Moving a copy of your data to offline tape means that this data is no longer connected to the network, it’s removed from the threat matrix of online attacks.  Moving a copy of your data to a secure offsite vault will protect your data from numerous threats and disasters. It has always been a best practice across all organizations to have a fully protected copy of data offline.  This is even more critical today since the threat of cybercrime and ransomware is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it will only continue to increase and we’re glad to help our customers protect themselves.

For more information, visit https://www.datastorage-na.fujifilm.com/object-archive.