2022 - Retrospective look at Storage

Fujifilm Recording Media (Rich Gadomski, head of tape evangelism)

Sustainability Became Priority
Many conferences throughout 2022 focused on sustainability as a priority in IT operations. Data Center World, Flash Memory Summit, Open Compute Summit, and SC22, to name a few. The most notable event was the Open Compute Summit which announced Sustainability as its 5th tenet. Given the undeniable impacts of climate change and the energy crisis due to grid limitations and geo-political tensions, carbon reduction and energy conservation seriously influenced data storage strategies. Active archive solutions incorporating automated tape systems can help reduce energy consumption by 87% and CO² by 97% compared to HDD alternatives.

Cybersecurity Concerns Lingered
Ransomware-as-a-service multiplied and remained a top C-suite imperative in 2022. Getting cyber insurance as liability coverage in the event of a data breach or ransomware attack also became more popular but not easier. Underwriters require stringent cyber-security measures, including regular backups with one copy offsite and air-gapped. This requirement stoked renewed interest in modern tape as a fail-safe and an affordable air gap line of defense against bad actors.

Uncertain Economic Conditions Emerged
Declining shipments of flash and HDD indicated slack storage demand amidst uncertain economic conditions. Fortunately, tape deployments remained a long-term strategic solution to the data volume and growth challenges facing customers from hyperscale to HPC to traditional enterprises. With the rising value of data and a heightened awareness of data temperature, the TCO advantage of tape continued to be compelling.

Point Software and Systems (Thomas Thalmann, CEO)

S3 to Tape for backup of object storage
More and more companies have realized that data availability is not the same thing as data protection. Therefore, in addition to high data availability, backup of an object storage system has become mandatory. The backup is often performed with a tape-based system, which could thus achieve both a media break and an “air gap“. As backup software a S3-to-tape approach is used, as this stores objects in native format and allows direct access to the backup data.

Unstructured Data Management to handle data growth and archiving requirements
The exponential data growth is the biggest challenge in IT. As most part is unstructured data which is getting inactive in a very short period, companies have implemented data management solutions to optimize the storage infrastructure and at the same time to fulfill archiving requirements. These software solutions integrate multiple storage tiers, platforms, and locations (on-prem and off-prem).