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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WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU DRIVE CHANGE
TOGETHER WE WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE.
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EMAIL:
Brad.Johns@bradjohnsconsulting.com
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News & Publications
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.
Updated Video Surveillance Retention Cost Calculator
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The Video Surveillance TCO calculator has been updated to include the new LTO 9 tape media and drives! Video surveillance (VS) has rapidly grown into an essential solution for organizations large and small. VS technology has evolved quickly, and today’s cameras feature very high resolution at attractive prices. With the proliferation of high-resolution cameras, the quantify of video has grown exponentially. Tape storage, integrated with disk-based storage, provides a lower cost, highly scalable solution for video surveillance. The updated tool can be accessed at this link.
Is tape really Eco-Friendly? - Video Roundtable
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I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion hosted by Fujifllm to discuss whether tape storage is really "Eco Friendly." Participants included two large users of tape storage, Fujifilm, IBM, and me. All the participants organizations had established aggressive sustainability goals to help address climate change. The discussion was wide-ranging and highlighted tapes role in helping data centers store very large quantities of data while reducing their CO2e emissions. In addition to reducing CO2 emissions, moving cold data to tape can significantly lower total costs. Here is a link to the video; Eco Friendly.