How One of Europe’s Largest Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed 23 Petabytes of Legacy Data into a Strategic Asset

Last year, we shared how Tape Ark partnered with a leading global pharmaceutical organization to modernize legacy tape archives and eliminate infrastructure complexity.

Today, we are proud to share the full scope of that transformation.
This European multinational healthcare and pharmaceutical provider with 40,000 employees and over US$25 billion in revenue — faced a challenge that many large enterprises quietly carry: decades of business-critical data stored on legacy tape systems across multiple global sites.

But this wasn’t just an archiving issue.

It was an operational, financial, compliance, and sustainability challenge.

And it required a fundamental shift in thinking.

The Starting Point: Complex, Fragmented, and Growing

The environment reflected the reality of long-established global enterprises:

  • 23 petabytes of data stored on tape
  • Over 11,000 tapes held in offsite storage
  • 14 data centers managing legacy infrastructure
  • 14 different tape technologies across sites
  • NetBackup format (now Cohesity)
  • Infinite data retention requirements

This meant maintaining aging hardware, specialist knowledge, maintenance contracts, media management, and physical storage logistics — across 14 different locations.

Data access times could stretch from weeks to months.
And yet, much of this data had long-term compliance, legal, and scientific value.
The infrastructure was costly.
The complexity was high.
The risk was increasing.
The sustainability impact was significant.

The Strategic Decision: Don’t Migrate. Modernize.

Rather than continuing to maintain fragmented legacy tape ecosystems, our client made a decisive move: Ingest and virtualize the entire tape estate into Microsoft Azure.

Tape Ark delivered a solution to:

  • Ingest and virtualize all 23PB of tape data
  • Preserve full restore capability for NetBackup (Cohesity) formats
  • Enable centralized access from a single management location
  • Decommission hardware across 14 global data centers
  • Eliminate reliance on offsite legacy tape storage

This was not just data migration. It was legacy liberation.

 

The Outcomes: Operational, Financial, and Environmental Impact

The transformation delivered measurable impact across the business.

Infrastructure Simplification

  • 22 racks eliminated from active data center management
  • 14 sites consolidated to one centralized management location
  • Retirement of 14 separate tape technologies
  • Massive reduction in hardware and software maintenance obligations

Financial Efficiency

  • Elimination of offsite tape storage costs from 14 sites
  • Removal of long-term legacy hardware refresh cycles
  • Reduced operational overhead and vendor complexity
  • Predictable Azure consumption aligned to infinite retention requirements

Speed & Accessibility

  • Data access times reduced from months to hours
  • Data now readily extractable for:
    • Regulatory compliance
    • Legal requests
    • Research and AI initiatives

For the first time, decades of archived data became immediately usable.

 

Sustainability Gains

Perhaps one of the most significant — and often overlooked — outcomes was the environmental impact.
Closing 22 racks across 14 data centers delivered substantial carbon offsets.
Eliminating the power, cooling, and hardware lifecycle footprint of legacy tape infrastructure materially reduced the organization’s operational emissions.
Modernizing archive infrastructure is not just an IT decision — it’s a sustainability strategy.

 

From Archive to Asset

Historically, enterprise tape archives were treated as a compliance burden — something to maintain, but rarely leverage.

Today, organizations are recognizing that historical data is fuel for:

  • Advanced analytics
  • AI and machine learning initiatives
  • Regulatory readiness
  • Corporate governance
  • Institutional knowledge preservation

By virtualizing tape archives into Azure, our customer turned a fragmented legacy estate into a future-ready digital asset.

Pharma Case Study Mar26

A Broader Industry Reality

Across pharmaceuticals, financial services, energy, healthcare, and government, we see the same pattern:

  • Infinite retention requirements
  • Decades of tape accumulation
  • Hardware nearing end of life
  • Specialized skills disappearing
  • Rising storage and compliance risks

The question is no longer if enterprises modernize their legacy tape estates.
It is when — and whether they will lead proactively or react under pressure.

 

The Future Is Accessible

At Tape Ark, we believe legacy data should not be trapped in obsolete infrastructure.
It should be secure.
It should be accessible.
It should be compliant.
And it should be usable.

This transformation proves that even at massive scale — 23 petabytes across 14 global sites — legacy tape can be modernized without compromising retention, compliance, or operational continuity.

This is what responsible data modernization looks like.

And it’s only the beginning.