You heard that right, the wait is over, LTO-8 tape is back! If ever there was anything sexy about tape this is got to be one of those moments…LTO-8 media is back, and boy are we glad! We will be seeing an influx of LTO-8 media flood the market very soon. This news couldn’t have […]

The topic of data growth and security continues to be a challenge for many organizations. The question to “air-gap” or not to “air-gap” is consistently being posed across all industries as they think about a solid backup and archive strategy. When it comes to how and where to invest, air-gapping becomes the last item on […]

As cameras and other media devices steadily rise in number and improve in capability, sports broadcasters, production companies, and movie studios all face a mutually critical challenge: What to do with these expanding libraries of valuable content?

With macro-trends like looming Zettabyte scale unstructured data and the increasing threat from ransomware, LTO’s properties and attributes have made it a key technology in the future.

Once again, World Backup Day upon us, which is a great reminder that you don’t want to be like the guy who almost lost Toy Story 2...or the one who sparked a massive outage in Amazon AWS, right?

Like many video production studios today, your team is probably creating more and more content. As the requests for assets pour in from across your enterprise, you’re producing marketing videos that show off new product features, HR videos that help recruit job applicants, sales training videos that offer strategies for closing deals, and more.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been updating a number of technical documents about how LTO-7 and soon to be released LTO-8 have made quantum leaps in both capacity (recording density) and data reliability. During this process, I thought back to the days of old when we old-timers were just getting started, before data storage became a specialty. It’s somewhat mind-boggling how far data recording has progressed in recent years. Back in the day, the maximum data capacity of a 2,400-foot 9-track tape reel, recorded at 6,250 BPI was 170 MB. Today LTO-7 recording density is 19,107 bits/mm, which equates to 477,675 BPI, providing 6 TB per cartridge on a 3,400-foot piece of media—and LTO-8 is projected to have 12 TB per cartridge. Truly amazing!

Major companies, healthcare organizations, and individuals were hit this weekend by the newest ransomware attack—WannaCry. WannaCry affected an exploit in the Windows XP operating system on PCs. Microsoft shortly sent out a fix for the security flaw, but authorities warn that many more cases may come to light in the following weeks.

When we set out to do a lab validation of the Artico active archive appliance with industry analyst ESG, it felt like we were entering somewhat uncharted territory. We’ve done plenty of lab validations with ESG before – primarily with various models of DXi – but Artico is a different animal, it occupies a different place in the data center, and it breaks with so many traditional approaches to data archive, we had to wonder if ESG would “get it.”

Last week the Active Archive Alliance announced the availability of a report titled “Active Archive and the State of the Industry”. The report is primarily an educational piece, explaining the data growth challenge IT organizations are facing today, and then defining archive characteristics, showing how active archives are implemented and illustrating the resulting benefits.

OK, perhaps not as colorful as Shakespeare’s original phrase, but in today’s world of data and content proliferation the term archive has suffered tremendous abuse and misunderstanding. This would not be a problem for the reader if vendors and marketers of storage technology products and solutions did a better job of steering the marketplace with well-defined terms that truly meant what they sounded like.

When we received word that Storage Magazine had named Artico as a finalist to its 2015 Product of the Year Awards in the Backup Hardware category, it opened a bit of an existential debate. Backup Hardware? Isn’t there a more appropriate category for an NAS appliance designed to provide intelligent tiering to optimize performance and cost of archive storage? Apparently not, but that shouldn’t be a surprise. We knew at introduction that Artico was carving out a unique niche that takes a fresh approach to data retention and accessibility.