About Me
Brad Johns is currently the President of Brad Johns Consulting LLC. His firm provides analysis and consulting to help computer storage companies and end-users with their marketing and strategy needs.
Services
Providing experienced consulting and analysis to help computer storage companies and end-users with their marketing and strategy needs.
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TOGETHER WE WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE.
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EMAIL:
Brad.Johns@bradjohnsconsulting.com
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News & Publications
New White Paper - The Sustainable Preservation of Enterprise Data - Feb 2, 2024
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This newly published whitepaper, which I co-authored with John Monroe of Further Market Research, examines the implications and opportunities created by the dramatic expansion of the amount of digital information stored on SSD, HDD, tape storage and potentially new archive technologies. We estimate that at the end of 2022, 4.8 Zettabytes (millions of Petabytes) of data was stored on all media types. Further, we project that stored digital data will grow to over 40 Zettabytes in 2035. This dramatic growth is driven by social media, video, 5G networks, scientific research, medical records, video surveillance, media and entertainment, data mining, and artificial intelligence.
While more and more information is being stored, much of it is infrequently accessed. In fact, we estimate that as much as 70-80% of all data is cool, cold, or frozen with access frequency from days to weeks to years to never. Despite its infrequent access, much of this information is currently stored on HDD systems when it could be stored much more cost-effectively on tape storage. We estimate only 15% of the 2022 industry (SSD, HDD, and Tape) was tape storage.
We have projected that 62% of all storage shipments in 2035 will be tape or emerging enterprise archive storage technologies to reduce costs while reducing energy consumption. This shift will be enabled by the emergence of new storage management software combined with artificial intelligence and the growing awareness of the substantial benefits of moving infrequently accessed data to less expensive and more environmentally friendly storage technologies. The paper can be accessed at this link.
A major storage announcement took place today (August 22, 2023).
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IBM, in conjunction with Fujifilm, announced a new enterprise tape drive and tape media. The new TS1170 tape drive supports a 50 TB native capacity tape cartridge. This is a dramatic increase in capacity, over twice the TS1160’s 20 TB tape cartridge capacity. This new offering will greatly assist organizations to cost-effectively store large and growing amounts of cold data. In addition to lowering costs, the very low power requirements make it a compelling solution for reducing data center power consumption and improving sustainability.
Interestingly, this announcement comes almost exactly twenty years after the first IBM 3592 tape drive was announced. The first TS1100 tape drive (called the 3592 at the time) was announced in September 2003 and had a capacity of 300 GB per cartridge. Today’s announcement of a 50 TB cartridge capacity is over 160 times larger than the 2003 cartridge.
For IT organizations that are looking for cost-effective, sustainable solutions for managing the dramatic growth of archive data, this is an exciting offering. The benefits are significant enough to justify projects that implement the software and processes necessary to manage archive data effectively. Detail on the new tape drive can be found at this link.
Improving Information Technology Sustainability With Modern Tape Storage
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Sustainability and CO2 emission reduction are a major challenge for the Information Technology (IT) industry. Driven by cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data, and the expansion of 5G networks, industry analysts estimate that the amount of data stored may grow to 17 Zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. In this paper published in the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, August 2023 issue, I highlight how IT organizations have an opportunity to reduce their carbon footprint, improve sustainability and reduce expenses by migrating less frequently accessed from hard disk drive (HDD) based storage to modern tape storage. Follow this link to the paper link.