Tape Ark has moved a significant collection of tape-based sports video footage to Google Cloud.
Tape Ark was called on by "one of the world's largest sports broadcasters" to migrate its historical collections of sports footage to the cloud using Google Cloud's Video On Demand (VOD) streaming technology.
Historically, broadcasters have relied on tapes for storing and managing large content collections due to their low cost, high durability, and energy efficiency.
The cloud ingest of the collection measures over 40 petabytes of video footage. By moving it to the cloud, the broadcaster will be able save time and money on the maintenance of the collection including the legacy tape infrastructure, software licenses, data center space, and its associated power and cooling costs, as well as the physical management of their on-premise systems.
In addition, the broadcaster will be able to monetize its content which has previously been left unused. The broadcaster can also utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies for new analyses of the footage.
“Content sitting idle on tape media is an asset that needs to be liberated to the cloud to take full advantage of the opportunities it presents. This is not only the case for sports content, but also for news, health, research, weather, banking, and insurance to name just a few. Tape Ark has now liberated almost 1 exabyte of content in the last three years, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Guy Holmes, founder and CEO of Tape Ark.
Tape Ark is based in Australia and has 'mass ingest locations' in five countries including the US, Canada, the UK, and India.
Tape Ark uses Equinix data centers to provide its cloud migration services. The company eventually plans to have more than 10 mass tape ingest points in Equinix IBX data centers, Guy Holmes is quoted as saying in a 2023 Equinix case study.
According to that case study, the company uses Equinix Fabric to connect directly to public cloud providers, bypassing external Internet hubs.
Tape Ark was previously selected to transfer the UK's Met Office data to Microsoft's £1.2bn ($1.56bn) supercomputer. At the time, Tape Ark said that it was the world's largest-ever tape-to-cloud ingest project with more than 220 petabytes of historical weather data migrating to the cloud.
Tape Ark has also worked with Microsoft to test out the cloud company's long-term storage product, Project Silica.
While tape storage has typically been viewed as a legacy storage solution, it is still used in certain contexts. For example, in March 2023, Spectra Logic deployed an exascale Tape library at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, the US. The storage was deployed to support the research with the Rubin Observatory which is conducting a 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, collecting light from celestial objects and transforming it into data.
Earlier this year, Quantum announced a new generation of its tape library, Scalar i7 Raptor, which is designed to handle advanced AI workloads for hyperscalers.
