Tape drives get new lease on life in AI-dominated market

Tape drives might seem like old news, but according to Spectra Logic Corp., they’re a part of the modern data solution. Now reaching its 25th anniversary, the company focuses on tape-based solutions with an eye toward current cloud and artificial intelligence-based trends.

“Tape is 75 years old,” said Mitch Seigle (pictured), chief marketing officer of Spectra Logic. “It’s had an incredibly long run, but it’s far from archaic. It has actually gone through a transformation from most of its lifetime, where it required large organizations to be able to integrate it … we’re now seeing different forms of object storage emerge from what was once disk-based to now things that are even based in flash and now ultimately in tape. What we’ve been focused on is building interfaces that front-end those libraries and take care of the abstraction.”

Seigle spoke with theCUBE’s Christophe Bertrand at the Data Protection & AI Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what tape technology looks like in the current tech landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

Tape drives adapt with the times

Spectra Logic’s products are designed for high-performance computing, with high-profile clients such as Nasa AMES Research Center. The tenth iteration of Spectra Logic’s LTO tape drives now goes up to 30 terabytes, and the company offers Spectra Stack libraries that can grow as large as 17 petabytes, according to Seigle.

“Imagine if you’ve got a multi-petabyte [large language model], and you need to have multiple versions of that, the online storage of that, not only is it expensive, but it is very energy consumptive,” Seigle said. “It requires a lot of footprint, whereas tape consumes no energy when the tape’s not being used. It’s very, very energy efficient, the most energy efficient of all the storage technologies.”

Critics might wonder how tape can stand up to modern cloud architecture. Spectra Logic’s solution is its BlackPearl product platform, which essentially translates data on tape to the cloud, and the Tape Archival Platform As-a-Service, or TAPAS, which enables users to access tape through a cloud interface, Seigle noted.

“When you think about media and entertainment customers that are storing entire film libraries that need to be preserved forever, so think about the idea that tape really becomes the final destination in which we’re preserving, protecting and defending this data for all time,” Seigle suggested. “It’s this idea that data’s become forever, and so that you have to have that scale.”

Recently, the new Rubin Observatory in Chile sent back the first images of space and transmitted the data to Spectra Logic libraries installed at SLAC. Seigle hopes that tape’s reach will continue expand, whether it’s on Earth or in space.

“We’re very familiar with the idea that many of our customers store the world’s most important data,” he said. “But now with the data that we’re seeing of so many galaxies with such resolution that we’ve never seen before, I would venture to say that we’ve gone from global importance to galactic significance.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Data Protection & AI Summit:

(* Disclosure: Spectra Logic Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Spectra Logic nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE