Fujifilm offers subscriptions for tape-based object storage
Fujifilm Recording Media U.S.A. Inc. is giving membership pricing for the tape-based mostly object storage program that it launched as an on-premises alternative to AWS Glacier for chilly details.
The tape specialist’s Amazon S3 API-compatible Object Archive turned obtainable in May possibly. Fujifilm afterwards included the novel membership strategy that bundles its program, business-day aid, and tape media potential for principal and secondary copies of the details.
Subscription time period choices are 1 yr, 3 a long time or 5 a long time at pricing tiers of 1 petabyte (PB) to ten PB, ten PB to fifty PB, and fifty-in addition PB. Sample checklist price ranges to retail store 1 PB of details — utilizing two PB of tape potential, for two copies — are $35,940 for a 3-yr membership and $forty six,a hundred for a 5-yr membership.
“Simply because the tape media is involved with the potential license in the membership, you have a predictable storage shell out for your archive heading into the foreseeable future,” claimed Chris Kehoe, head of infrastructure engineering at Fujifilm.
Enhance to present object storage
The Fujifilm Object Archive is just not developed as a substitution for the present on-premises disk-based mostly object storage that a customer may have, but instead, to enhance it by archiving to more affordable tape media. Cloudian and Scality, for instance, could mechanically tier details from their disk-based mostly object storage to the Fujifilm Object Archive, Kehoe claimed.
“If we glimpse at object storage currently, there is certainly every thing from very substantial IOPS for video clip modifying down to the reduced, a lot less pricey object storage,” Kehoe claimed. “A person is viewed as an energetic archive. What we are proposing is colder than object storage, for for a longer period-time period retention.”
Target use situations for the Fujifilm Object Archive include details-intensive investigation, genomics, everyday living sciences, analytics, oil and gas, substantial-general performance computing and transportation purposes. Fujifilm has a TCO device on its web site to support clients compare the cost to disk- and cloud-based mostly storage.
Tom Coughlin, president of storage consultancy Coughlin Associates, claimed object storage is a popular selection to archive details locally and in the general public cloud, so it will make perception for Fujifilm to give object storage on tape. He claimed the membership pricing could be vital for clients, enabling them to flip tape from a funds to an working expenditure.
“Given that utilizing tape instead than HDDs lowers costs — significantly the Opex cost — it may possibly make tape-based mostly archives utilizing object storage far more popular to far more details facilities,” Coughlin claimed.
Fred Moore, president at Horison Info Approaches, claimed the complete cost of possession for disk-based mostly archives could be 5x to 8x greater than tape, so Fujifilm’s tape archive holds out the opportunity for substantial discounts. He claimed utilizing an on-premises object storage for archives could also help clients to reduce the egress expenses that the important general public cloud vendors charge to retrieve details.
An additional opportunity benefit is more quickly details retrieval. Kehoe claimed the “time to very first byte” with AWS Glacier’s chilly object storage could be two hrs to twelve hrs, but the on-premises Fujifilm Object Archive could deliver the very first byte inside of a pair of minutes.
Kehoe claimed Fujifilm has huge clients that have repatriated details from the general public cloud again to on-premises storage and some that have moved details in between cloud vendors. But he claimed, about the extensive time period, he expects to see “details shift a minor bit in each path.”
Other suppliers also give on-premises object storage archives on tape. For instance, Spectra’s BlackPearl Object Storage Tape appliance supports an S3-like interface to shift details into its object storage. But Fujifilm’s Object Archive can run on any x86 server and use tape libraries from many suppliers, together with Spectra, IBM, Quantum, Oracle and Hewlett Packard Organization. Clients have a selection of Fujifilm’s LTO-seven or greater-potential LTO-eight tape media.
Fujifilm writes details to tape in its recently formulated OTFormat that can pack tiny objects into much larger objects to increase effectiveness. Kehoe claimed Fujifilm formulated the open up file format to help the process to manage objects natively on tape in a self-described method. Clients see a bucket of objects in the very same way they would in Amazon S3 object storage, Kehoe claimed.
Fujifilm is giving a no cost membership to its Object Archive program for up to five hundred TB through the close of the yr. The demo does not include the tape media.
