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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 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 However, this view is completely out of date.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.

Brookhaven National Labs (BNL) has grown from 60 PB of data archived in 2015 to 145 PB of data archived in 2018. In this Fujifilm Summit video, David Yu explains how BNL is using tape storage to cost-effectively manage this data growth. In addition, BNL uses an active archive system to provide easy access to data that is frequently needed by the BNL data center and other research institutions.

Explosive data growth continues to be a top challenge for today’s organizations and this growth is only going to increase in the future. In fact, according to analyst firm IDC, by 2025 worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers.

New technologies and approaches are continually being created to help address this data storage deluge. Members of the Active Archive Alliance from Fujifilm Recording Media, U.S.A., Inc, Spectra Logic, StrongBox Data and Quantum recently shared their insights into what the future looks like for active archives and data storage in 2019. Here are some of their top predictions:

Artificial Intelligence Creates Demand for Active Archives
The evolution of deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence will continue to expand in 2019 across every industry as the digital transformation wave produces an explosion of big data. With these AI tools, organizations will be able to extract more value from their data than ever before giving rise to an insatiable demand for more data, more analytics…more competitive advantage. A dramatic increase in storage and specifically active archive will be required to cost effectively and efficiently provide accessibility to big data at scale.

Flash Will Gain Wide-Scale Adoption, But a Need to Store Everything Will Make Secondary Storage More Important Than Ever
In the coming year we will see wide-scale adoption of flash storage. Organizations of all sizes will include solid-state drive (SSD) for greater performance, energy savings, space efficiency, and reduced management. New technologies like integrated data protection, storage federation/automation, policy-based provisioning, tiered data movement, and public cloud integration will be built on top of this flash foundation.

With the increased adoption of flash, organizations will also face the challenge of how to affordably store the data that is not mission critical, but still has value and therefore cannot be deleted. With the move to flash organizations will utilize a secondary storage tier to affordably manage all the organizations data, and this will happen through intelligent data management software designed to move data to a more affordable tier, without sacrificing access and searchability of the data.

Shift From Managing Your Storage to Managing Your Data
Data, not the underlying physical storage, is what matters. However, traditional storage systems are “big dumb buckets” that provide precious little insight into what data is growing, what applications or users are accessing it, or what is consuming storage performance and why.

Next-generation storage systems are “data-aware,” with real-time analytics built directly into the storage itself, delivering real-time information on data and performance at massive scale providing insight into data and storage.  As organizations better understand their data (how it is being generated, at what pace, by who, for what project) they are more informed as to how to plan and budget for the future growth of their data, and better understand how to move data to different tiers based on customized policies.

Cross-platform Storage Automation Reduces Costs, Increases Productivity
The reality is that there is not a “one-size-fits-all” storage solution that addresses the multiple requirements faced by most organizations.  The result is that large environments typically rely on multiple storage vendors and point solutions to address the different performance and cost profiles needed for their data. The problem is this adds complexity for IT managers, requiring them to do more with static or shrinking operational budgets. This trend is driving a demand in the industry for solutions that provide automation of data and storage resource management across any storage type from any vendor. Such solutions leverage policy engines and management tools that are driven by multiple types of metadata about the files and their business value as they evolve over time. Such automation tools help data managers know what they have, and gives them control of cross-platform data migration, tiering, active archiving, and protection, without interrupting users. This type of metadata-driven automation will be an increasing trend over the next few years, because it provides demonstrable ROI by reducing OPEX and complexity for IT, breaking storage vendor lock-in, while increasing storage utilization efficiency and user productivity.

Rich Media Content Will Grow Exponentially, Across Many Industries
Video now constitutes 50% of all data. Rich media comprises our video surveillance; consumer images, voice and video; medical imagery, IoT, entertainment and social media. Large and unstructured data is often 50 times or larger than the average corporate database. Video is unique, and it is not typically a good fit for traditional backup; it cannot be compressed or deduplicated, it doesn’t work well with replication, snaps or clones, and ingest speed is critical. Rich media is projected to surpass 100 Zetabytes worldwide by 2020. Expect enterprise data services to be increasingly optimized for large or rich media data sets, with infrastructure optimized for ingest processing and the full life cycle management of forms of rich media.

By diversifying your renewable energy mix, you can achieve energy efficiency gains even with data centers which typically carry large power loads.  In this Fujifilm video, Craig Lewis, Executive Director of Clean Coalition talks about how tape storage allows us to do more work with more data storage using a lot less energy.  Watch it here:

By Floyd Christofferson,
SVP of Products at Strongbox Data

It is no illusion that every time you turn around it seems there is another report of a high-profile hack of sensitive personal data, impacting hundreds of millions of people all over the world. The recent Equifax hack released personal financial data of over 143 million consumers, but that was not an isolated incident. In 2016 and 2017 so far there have been at least 26 major hacks around the world that have released personal data of more than 700 million people. These include hacks of telecommunication companies, financial institutions, government agencies, universities, shopping sites, and much more.

The hacks are not a new problem. But in a global economy with often conflicting political and economic priorities at stake, there has been no comprehensive approach to ensuring people have the right to protect and delete if they want, all of their personal data.

The European Union’s new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) went into effect in May 2018. Although GDPR is designed to protect European citizens, the rules and penalties apply to any company from any country who does business in Europe. And the penalties are significant, with companies at risk of being fined up to 4% of their global annual gross revenues or €20 million (whichever is greater) for failing to comply with strict right-to-be-forgotten and privacy protections for customer data.

As a result, there is a growing panic among businesses as they try to figure out how to solve this problem in time, and how to do so with existing data management and storage resources that are not designed for this task. And the concern is not only in Europe. Companies in the US and around the world who have customers in Europe are also scrambling to ensure they are in full compliance by the deadline. But according to Gartner, by the end of 2018 over 50% of companies affected by the GDPR worldwide will not be in full compliance with its requirements.

In this paper we offer an overview of the key provisions of GDPR that impact storage and data management for both structured and unstructured data. In subsequent technical briefs, we will go into more detail about specific technical solutions to help ensure your data environment is in compliance, even with your existing storage and data infrastructure.

In this video, Brad Johns provides the real cost of ownership of your data storage over 10 years and explains why tape is the most affordable option for long-term data storage. Although many companies use a variety of different storage platforms, tape is the most practical and the most affordable for backup and archive.

For one petabyte of raw, non-compressible data, the cost savings versus high capacity disk is about 74% over the course of 10 years; the savings increase to 84% when compared to the cloud.  Brad Johns crunched the numbers and tape is undeniably the cheapest option for long-term storage.

Find out how you can start saving on your data storage costs. Access the free TCO calculator here.

Organizations are quickly learning the value of analyzing vast amounts of previously untapped archival data. Industry studies suggest that only about 20% of all digital data is ever accessed or used again after it is stored, underscoring the archival challenge. The need to effectively store, search for and retrieve enormous volumes of archival content is fueling new advancements in archive solutions.

This Active Archive Alliance report describes the state of the archive market and the role that the active archive plays. View the full report here.