Perth-based ‘tape to cloud’ startup Take Ark has recently partnered with US-based data storage giant Seagate Technology.
Remember the days of back up tapes… taking them home overnight, as the only record of the code your team had written that day; which could be extracted if your computer servers had an absolute meltdown?
Not so long ago really, as this was the practice – before the cloud – of backing anything up. I bet some people still do.
18-month old local startup Tape Ark has banked its future on the fact that there could be over a billion of these tapes being stored in physical offsite locations around the world.
Some hearken back to the 1980s and 90s; tapes of mining drill results, videos of old TV shows, radio tapes and tapes of maps and data of almost everything description.
Tape Ark argues that much of the data on these tapes could be at risk, not easily accessible, and susceptible to decay, deterioration and even permanent loss. Much of it is left to gather cobwebs on shelves barely visited, badly referenced, almost impossible to search. Zombie data, if you will.
The problem is – how can you access all this tape data, discover what’s there and make it useful?
The announcement just before Christmas 2018 that Tape Ark had struck a deal with Californian data storage company Seagate was a significant step for the local company.
The partnership will allow Seagates’s ‘Lyve Data‘ Services to combine with Tape Ark’s data restoration technology, to enable tape-bound data to be transferred from the client’s aging offsite tapes directly to a large public cloud platforms of the customer’s choice.
This could rescue zettabytes of data otherwise thought lost.
Tape Ark Founder and CEO Guy Holmes said “the Tape Ark team is excited and proud to be partnering with Seagate Technology – a global data storage leader and innovator. This announcement is a significant step in Tape Ark’s road map for growth and coincides with the finalisation of our first round of venture capital funding.”
Guy Holmes, Tape Ark
“With zettabytes of data sitting on ageing, inaccessible tapes globally, this partnership will effectively see the largest data recovery project ever undertaken in human history become a reality.
“Our vision is to give data back to the client and make it instantly and economically accessible to them where and when they want it. Ingesting these data sets into the cloud puts clients back in control of their data assets and by applying today’s analytics and machine learning tools they can potentially make profound discoveries from their legacy data.”
Paul Steele, senior director of Seagate’s Lyve Data Services said: “The legacy data in the world’s tape archives holds the potential to deliver tremendous value and potentially major breakthroughs in research, understanding, processes and practices in a wide variety of sectors, but only if it’s brought in from the cold.
“We believe clients will gain an incalculable advantage by adding years or decades of latent data back into their data sets to be accessible for AI-enabled deep analytics.”
Paul Steele, Seagate
It’s a big opportunity for Tape Ark, and in a world of big data, one wonders how much data is already available, but lost to the world gathering dust.
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For more: TapeArk.com
