2025 Data Storage and Active Archive Predictions: Part 2
Tape-based active archives are set to remain a game-changer in reducing cost and energy consumption. In Part two of our Annual Trends, our members take a a look at sustainability, tape and long-term storage.
Sustainability Makes a Comeback in Data Storage with Active Archives
Despite daily examples of the devastating effects of climate change, broader corporate sustainability initiatives have in many cases moved off center stage due to unachievable and overly aggressive goals with poor return on investment. Meanwhile, in the IT industry, the shiny new thing is AI with its energy intensive GPUs dwarfing the energy requirements of traditional CPUs. AI also requires massive volumes of data to feed its training models and more data gets generated in the process that may never be deleted even after it goes cold. Sustainable active archive solutions with intelligent data management capabilities can leverage ultra energy-efficient and extremely cost-effective tiers of storage such as S3 compatible object-based tape libraries. This will be needed to offset the voracious energy consumption of truly cutting-edge and breakthrough AI applications as the AI age evolves in 2025 and beyond. – Rich Gadomski, Head of Tape Evangelism, FUJIFILM North America Corp., Data Storage Solutions
Modern Object Storage Will Expand to Include Long-Term Tape Solutions
The explosion of Generative AI and increased demand for unstructured data retention is exceeding modern IT budget growth. Standardized object storage interfaces are making it easy to move data, but object storage was designed as a single tier utilizing hard disk drives. Tiering will become a standard requirement for active data object storage vendors. Modern object storage solutions will expand support to include tape and other long-term storage mediums as an object storage deep archive target, at a fraction of the cost of cloud archives. Cloud will continue to be part of the hybrid data protection strategy. The results will be lowered costs for organizations storing Petabytes of data. – Mark Hill, Business Line Executive Data Retention Infrastructure, IBM
Active Archive Based on Standards and Established Tape Technology: Essential for Future Data Centers
Standardization plays a major role in the data center sector. This applies not only to hardware, but also to software. The need for data archiving in data centers will increase as data volumes grow rapidly due to applications such as AI. For example, active archive concepts based on established tape technology and standardized object-based software interfaces will be used to enable the active use of archived data. Active archives based on scalable and rack-mountable tape libraries that are designed for use in data centers and can be integrated via standardized software interfaces such as S3, will become indispensable in future data centers. – Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems
Tape-based Active Archive Complements the Fastest AI Storage
QStar believes the use of AI to provide added insight into multiple types of data will be a major driving force in many IT departments over the next year and into the future. The use of tier 1 primary storage and new tier 0 GPU based storage will require significant data sets or project data to be available for relatively short periods of time during processing. At other times, this data has to be stored securely and be readily available when next needed, but also stored at low-cost, due to the size of the data sets involved. Multi-node tape-based active archive solutions provide everything an AI environment requires, by using many tape drives in parallel to increase significantly raw performance. Tape media is the lowest cost and most secure form of storage. AI applications can choose to access this data through a file system (SMB or NFS) or S3 API protocols. – David Thomson, SVP Sales and Marketing, QStar Technologies
Tape Enables More Cost-Effective Active Archives in 2025
The percentage of total data that goes on tape will increase within active archive environments. I don’t just mean more data will go on tape than before, which has been the case for a while. I’m saying more data will go on tape thanks to its cost, energy and long-term reliability advantages, when compared to the amount of data going on disk,. – Curtis Preston, Technology Evangelist, S2|Data
