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.

Often, when people use the term ‘archive’ it means many different, often erroneous, things: Some refer to any time that tape is used, instead of disk, to be an ‘archive’ – compared with a ‘backup’. Some refer to ‘archiving’ as the grooming or moving of data from primary storage. Some refer to any long-term retention mechanism (greater than a year) as an archive, even if the copies of data were originally created by a backup application or just a drag-and-drop of a folder or other object

Las Vegas is the home for what’s going to be one of the biggest hotspot for determining the future of IT and data protection. VeeamOn 2015 is almost here. Quantum and Veeam recently cemented our Premier Partnership and we’re excited to talk about how we’re helping customers break free from old school, traditional ways of protecting data. That’s what Kicking The Cartel is all about. Storage companies will be all over VeeamOn, competing for your attention, showing off their latest and greatest in an attempt to be one step ahead of the rapid change in the way companies store data. And we all know the way people access data is changing – with access patterns and virtual workloads becoming less and less predictable. Customers need to have greater access to their data, and they don’t want to pay thousands of dollars per TB for a ‘one size fits all’ to protect it.

The demands of media delivery have evolved drastically over recent years, with more and more organizations producing often large volumes of video content for a range of uses. As that media landscape evolves, so too must the enabling tools, such as the MAM systems. Naturally with increasing numbers of media files being created, effective storage solutions are becoming increasingly important. Quantum StorNext provides great flexibility and performance for media workflows. By integrating Cantemo Portal with StorNext, our users can automate migration of content based on policies to more cost-effective long-term storage within Quantum.