Tape Ark has selected Platform Equinix and its digital services to reduce latency and improve connectivity so its customers can virtualise their entire physical tape collection and preserve their backups in a secure, highly redundant and low-cost virtual tape library.
A vast amount of the world’s largest and historical data collections sit idle and inaccessible on tape media because it was one of the cost-effective places organisations could store records since the 1970s.
With advancements in digital technologies, the Perth-based technology firm, which specialises in tape to cloud migration, is liberating these data collections for organizations.
Once liberated, Tape Ark’s customers can generate new knowledge and new revenue streams from multi-petabytes of historical data.
With operations in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, Tape Ark has turned to Equinix to advance its digital infrastructure to support the next phase of its expansion, improving the performance of its tape to cloud migration services and meeting local data sovereignty needs.
To migrate multi-petabyte data collections to the cloud where organisations can connect and analyse all their data (legacy and current) in real-time, requires a network-dense digital infrastructure with rich ecosystems in key locations that are adjacent to all major cloud service providers.
With the rise in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) adoption, Tape Ark’s migration services are helping researchers and analysts in various industries perform more impactful studies, such as identifying major diseases based on medical records and discovering diverse trends in farming output to water and electricity consumption.
In Europe, Tape Ark is currently moving over 300Pb of data to the cloud for a meteorology organization to conduct weather modeling analysis.
Tape Ark’s data migration services are used globally in a variety of industry sectors, including media and entertainment, healthcare and life sciences, mining and metals, education and research, the public sector and more.
In the media and entertainment sector, streaming services have seen major television and movie companies rely on Tape Ark to migrate their content archives to the cloud to create new revenue streams.
Currently, Tape Ark is leveraging Equinix Fabric and Equinix Network Edge, as well as Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) in Montreal, to connect directly to public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
With data and applications kept in the same Equinix location, there is no speed performance issue to move large volumes of data. Direct access to the digital ecosystems also enables new opportunities and new marketplaces for customer collaboration and partnerships.
Looking ahead, in the next three to five years Tape Ark plans to deploy in more than 10 Equinix IBX facilities around the world, including Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Dublin, Mumbai, Sydney, and Perth as major data ingest locations.
“With advancements in cloud and digital technologies, Tape Ark’s customers need to migrate legacy tapes from offsite backup storage vaults to the cloud, which is essential to their future innovation and growth,” said Guy C. Holmes, CEO and president of Tape Ark.
“Not only does it enable them to run powerful AI programs, generate new insights and create new revenue opportunities, but it also reduces the risk of exposure for organisations with sensitive data,” said Holmes.
Guy Danskine, managing director of Equinix Australia, said that the sheer scale and size of the data migrations Tape Ark undertakes for its customers requires critical digital infrastructure, control and low latency.
