I had the opportunity to attend in person and present on the latest in tape technology at the 16th Annual Flash Memory Summit (FMS) held in Santa Clara last week. That’s right, tape technology at a flash conference. My friends from the DNA Data Storage Alliance were there presenting too. So what gives?
The Active Archive Alliance recently released its 2020 Active Archive and the State of the Industry Report, which highlights the increased demand for new data management strategies as well as benefits and use cases for active archive solutions.
Here are a few takeaways from the report:
Sponsors of the report include Active Archive Alliance members Atempo, Fujifilm Recording Media USA, IBM, Iron Mountain, Harmony Healthcare IT, MediQuant, PoINT Software & Systems, Quantum, Qumulo, QStar Technologies, Spectra Logic, StrongBox Data Solutions and Western Digital.
You can read the full report here.
For more information on the Active Archive Alliance visit: www.activearchive.com.
July 22, 2020
By Kevin Benitez
How much do you really know about your data? Is your data on the right storage type? How active is your data, and how is it being used?
From life sciences and media and entertainment to HPC/Research, higher education, government and consumer products, virtually ALL enterprises struggle to manage data with fewer resources and at less cost. Heterogeneous storage environments have added complexities, costs, and made it difficult for IT managers to manage data.
Don’t let multi-vendor storage silos get in the way of effective data management.
This webinar series goes beyond just organizing your data. Throughout three short webinars, you’ll learn about how to take control, protect, and manage your data – all while enhancing workflow and reducing costs.
Join Floyd Christofferson, CEO of StrongBox Data Solutions, in a webinar series that will teach you how you can make the most of your data:
Don’t let multi-vendor storage silos get in the way of effective data management.
July 28, 2020 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM Eastern Time
How to Better Manage Data Growth in a Multi-Vendor Storage Environment.
August 4, 2020 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM Eastern Time
Techniques to better use your data and not waste time trying to wrangle it.
August 11, 2020 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM Eastern Time
By Rich Gadomski
March 19, 2020
As LTO-8 drives and media are increasingly deployed and widely available, the value proposition of LTO-8 is being confirmed by customers and it’s a pretty impressive story.
In the case of a major high-performance computing (HPC) customer who had been using LTO-6 previously for their archive, the jump to LTO-8 has done wonders for their available capacity. With approximately 7,000 slots in their library, fully loaded with LTO-6 media at 2.5TB each yielded a total native storage capacity of 17.5 PB. Migrating to LTO-8 drives and eventually converting those slots to LTO-8 media at 12.0 TB gives them up to a massive 84 PBs, almost a 5X increase. That’s lots of room to scale as needed!
Performance also gets a big boost as LTO-6 drives are rated at 160 MB per second transfer rate compared to LTO-8 drives at 360 MB per second. This means fewer drives are required to meet the same performance objectives. As a result, TCO also gets a major boost as fewer drives, fewer pieces of media and no additional floor space or library frames are required to manage the same amount of data.
By Kevin Benitez
I had the opportunity to attend SC18 last month in Dallas. Every year the Supercomputing Conference brings together the latest in supercomputing technology and the most brilliant minds in HPC. People from all over the world and different backgrounds converged this year for the 30thSupercomputing Conference.
As you can imagine, some of the demonstrations were absolutelymind-blowing and worth sharing. For starters, power consumption in data centers is becoming more of a challenge as data rates continue to surge. Fortunately, 3M was live on the trade show floor tackling this issue by demonstrating immersion cooling for data centerswhich has the potential to slash energy use and cost by up to 97%. As this technology continues to evolve,we could see huge gains in performance and in reducing environmental impacts.
The race to dominate quantum computing continues! IBM’s 50-Qubit quantum computer made an appearance at this year’s show. What does it mean to have a computer with 50 qubits working perfectly? (Side note, in quantum computing a qubitis the basic unit of quantum information). According to Robert Schoelkopf, a Yale professor, if you had 50 or 100 qubitsyou could “do unfathomable calculations that can’t be replicated on any classical machine, now or ever.” Although the quantum computer churns out enough computational power to rank within the top ten supercomputers in the world,the device can only compute for 100 milliseconds due to a short-lived power supply.
StrongBox Data’s flagship product, StrongLink, was demonstrated on the show floor as a way to store and contain the vast amount of data that research universities and laboratories are producing. StrongLinkis a software solution that simplifies and reduces the cost of managing multi-vendor storage environments. StrongLink provides multi-protocol access across any file system, object storage, tape and cloud in a global namespace. Users maintain a constant view of files regardless of where they arestored, which maximizes their storage environment for performance and cost.
Recently the University of Southampton’s Supercomputer Iridis 5 teamed up with StrongLink to get more value out of its data. Oz Parchment, Director of the University’s iSolutions IT support division, commented in March saying: “One wayStrongLink interested us was its cognitive component, the ability to look at and match up metadata at scale, which gets interesting when you combine that with different data infrastructures. Our set up currently includes large-scale tape stores, large-scale disc stores, some of that being active data, some of that being nearline data, some being effectively offline data. But then, by linking these into the [Iridis] framework, which StrongLink allows us to do, we can connect these various data lakes that we have across the research side of the organization, and begin to create an open data space for our community where people in one discipline can look through data and see what kinds of data are available in other communities.“
Never has HPC been more crucial. As we say here at Fujifilm “Never Stop Transforming Ourselves and the World.”
We can help you reduce cost, decrease vendor lock-in, and increase productivity of storage staff while ensuring accessibility and longevity of data.
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