{"id":88597,"date":"2019-03-19T08:50:29","date_gmt":"2019-03-19T15:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=88597"},"modified":"2022-04-04T11:52:20","modified_gmt":"2022-04-04T18:52:20","slug":"ortana-cubix-core-media-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/ortana-cubix-core-media-archive\/","title":{"rendered":"Migrating Your Legacy Archive to Future-Ready Architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Guest blog post by James Gibson, Founder & CEO of Ortana Media Group.<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s a wide range of reasons why businesses want to migrate away from their current archive solution ranging from managing risk, concerns over legacy hardware, media degradation, and format support. Many businesses also find themselves stuck with closed format solutions that are based on legacy middleware with escalating support costs. It is a common problem that we at Ortana have helped many clients overcome through smart and effective use of the many storage solutions available on the market today. As Founder and CEO of Ortana, I want to share some of our collective experience around this topic and how we have found success for our clients.<\/p>\n

First, we often forget how quickly the storage landscape changes. Let\u2019s take a typical case.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Christmas 2008 and a CTO has just finalized the order on their new enterprise-grade hierarchical storage management (HSM) system with an LTO-4 tape robot. Beyonce\u2019s Single Ladies<\/em> is playing on the radio, GPS on phones has just started to be rolled out, and there is this new means of deploying mobile apps called the Apple\u2122 App Store! The system purchased is from a well established, reputable company and provides peace of mind and scalability\u2014what more can you ask for? The CTO goes home for the festive season\u2014job well done\u2014and hopes Santa brings him one of the new Android phones that have just launched.<\/p>\n

Ten years on, the world is very different and Moore\u2019s law tells us that the pace of technological change is only set to increase. That growing archive has remained on the same hardware, controlled by the same HSM and has gone through one or two expensive LTO format changes. \u201cThese migrations had to happen,\u201d the CTO concedes, as support for the older LTO formats was being dropped by the hardware supplier. Their whole content library had to be restored and archived back to the new tapes. New LTO formats also required new versions<\/a> of the HSM, and whilst these often included new features\u2014over codec support, intelligent repacking and reporting\u2014the fundamentals of the system remained: closed format, restricted accessibility, and expensive. Worse still, the annual support costs are increasing whilst the new feature development has ground to a halt. Sure, the archive still works, but for how much longer?<\/p>\n

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