Guy Holmes (Tape Ark)
Perth-based start-up Tape Ark has been handed a gargantuan project to convert terabytes of historical tape from the British Meteorological Office into cloud storage files.
Tape Ark, which specialises in migrating huge swathes of old-school magnetic tape files onto the cloud, will be tasked with transferring decades of tape collected by the UK Met Office into a supercomputer designed by Microsoft.
Microsoft itself won a A$2.2 billion contract from the Met Office to build a supercomputer which is anticipated to take "weather and climate forecasting to the next level and help the UK stay safe and thrive".
According to Tape Ark, the supercomputer can determine the weather up to one square metre. Currently in the proof-of-concept stage, Project Silica involves storing the data on an unbreakable glass ‘platter’, which can store 75.6 gigabytes of data.
As part of the deal, Tape Ark will migrate 220 petabytes of data to the cloud.
“I have personally overseen the transfer of millions of tapes in my career and tape deterioration and the lack of legacy hardware are real and very serious threats to some of the world’s most important collections of data," said Guy Holmes, founder and CEO of Tape Ark.
"The movement towards a storage medium that Project Silica enables is one of the most welcome advances in data storage technology that I have seen in the last decade."
Jurgen Willis, Microsoft vice president of program management, said the glass storage device will "stand the test of time".
Holmes first founded Tape Ark in 2017 after realising the cost of storing legacy tapes on shelves far outweighed those of paying for public cloud.
Working with all the public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Azure, Tape Ark has transferred data for some of the world's biggest entertainment companies, including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Boasting a significant presence in the US and now the UK, Tape Ark now has a team of 25 employees, mostly consisting of cloud architects, alongside a physicist, geophysicist and data scientist.
"One of the big challenges was early on was there was a disbelief that [content on tape] was a real problem; that the world had that content on tape that was created 10 years ago was even useful to anybody," said Holmes.
"And in the investment community, there were a lot of doubters. They said it wasn't a real market or that eventually we'll read all the tapes in the market will be finished.
"You know, the reality is we know there's over a billion tapes out there and we'd be quite happy to read them all."
Holmes said the company had seen growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking ahead into 2022, Holmes said Tape Ark has some "really cool projects" in the pipeline from the United States across broadcasting and aerospace.
In Australia, the company is also doing some extensive work in the public sector. "We're starting to see the government realise that maintaining hundreds of thousands of cases across numerous sites around the country is just not sustainable," Holmes explained.
"So we're starting to get some really good traction in the public sector. We're looking at partnering relationships with backup providers. So companies that currently back up tape and have customers who are migrating to the cloud and want to bring their collections with them into the cloud. So we're working on several partnerships in that space."
