Fujifilm Recording Media U.S.A. Inc. is presenting subscription pricing for the tape-primarily based object storage software program that it introduced as an on-premises alternate to AWS Glacier for chilly information.
The tape specialist’s Amazon S3 API-compatible Item Archive grew to become obtainable in May perhaps. Fujifilm later extra the novel subscription strategy that bundles its software program, business enterprise-day support, and tape media potential for most important and secondary copies of the information.
Membership term choices are a person calendar year, a few yrs or 5 yrs at pricing tiers of one petabyte (PB) to ten PB, ten PB to fifty PB, and fifty-in addition PB. Sample list prices to retail outlet one PB of information — making use of 2 PB of tape potential, for two copies — are $35,940 for a a few-calendar year subscription and $forty six,100 for a 5-calendar year subscription.
“Since the tape media is incorporated with the potential license in the subscription, you have a predictable storage expend for your archive heading into the long term,” said Chris Kehoe, head of infrastructure engineering at Fujifilm.
Enhance to current object storage
The Fujifilm Item Archive is just not built as a substitute for the current on-premises disk-primarily based object storage that a client may have, but alternatively, to enhance it by archiving to much less expensive tape media. Cloudian and Scality, for case in point, could mechanically tier information from their disk-primarily based object storage to the Fujifilm Item Archive, Kehoe said.
“If we glimpse at object storage nowadays, there is anything from quite substantial IOPS for video clip editing down to the decreased, less high-priced object storage,” Kehoe said. “A person is regarded an energetic archive. What we’re proposing is colder than object storage, for more time-term retention.”
Concentrate on use cases for the Fujifilm Item Archive involve information-intensive investigate, genomics, life sciences, analytics, oil and gas, substantial-effectiveness computing and transportation programs. Fujifilm has a TCO instrument on its web-site to aid prospects evaluate the price tag to disk- and cloud-primarily based storage.
Tom Coughlin, president of storage consultancy Coughlin Associates, said object storage is a well known selection to archive information domestically and in the general public cloud, so it would make feeling for Fujifilm to provide object storage on tape. He said the subscription pricing could be significant for prospects, enabling them to transform tape from a cash to an operating cost.
“Considering that making use of tape alternatively than HDDs lowers prices — particularly the Opex price tag — it may well make tape-primarily based archives making use of object storage much more well known to much more information centers,” Coughlin said.
Fred Moore, president at Horison Information and facts Procedures, said the complete price tag of possession for disk-primarily based archives could be 5x to 8x higher than tape, so Fujifilm’s tape archive retains out the possible for significant price savings. He said making use of an on-premises object storage for archives could also enable prospects to eliminate the egress costs that the main general public cloud companies cost to retrieve information.
A further possible benefit is more rapidly information retrieval. Kehoe claimed the “time to very first byte” with AWS Glacier’s chilly object storage could be two several hours to twelve several hours, but the on-premises Fujifilm Item Archive could provide the very first byte in a pair of minutes.
Kehoe said Fujifilm has huge prospects that have repatriated information from the general public cloud back to on-premises storage and some that have moved information amongst cloud companies. But he said, in excess of the extended term, he expects to see “information shift a very little bit in each individual way.”
Other distributors also provide on-premises object storage archives on tape. For instance, Spectra’s BlackPearl Item Storage Tape equipment supports an S3-like interface to shift information into its object storage. But Fujifilm’s Item Archive can operate on any x86 server and use tape libraries from multiple distributors, which include Spectra, IBM, Quantum, Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Customers have a selection of Fujifilm’s LTO-seven or higher-potential LTO-8 tape media.
Fujifilm writes information to tape in its recently created OTFormat that can pack compact objects into bigger objects to increase efficiency. Kehoe said Fujifilm created the open up file format to enable the method to deal with objects natively on tape in a self-explained method. Customers see a bucket of objects in the identical way they would in Amazon S3 object storage, Kehoe said.
Fujifilm is presenting a totally free subscription to its Item Archive software program for up to 500 TB by way of the end of the calendar year. The trial does not involve the tape media.
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