Nexus – Cloud Based Legacy Tape Management

What is Tape Ark’s Nexus SaaS platform?

Nexus is a cloud based platform for the management of legacy tape based data that allows you to view, analyze and restore data from your legacy tape environments without the need to maintain any physical tape storage, legacy tape hardware, software or data center space.

Nexus simplifies the way organizations manage and protect their legacy data, irrespective of when it was created or what platform created it.

Nexus relieves businesses of the burden of buying or managing software and the infrastructure needed to support legacy data backed up to tape, allowing companies to pivot to the cloud without worrying about how they will manage their past data collections.

Nexus allows businesses to pay for the service using a SaaS model that doesn’t require any capital expenditure (CapEx) for equipment or software, or related operational expenditure (OpEx) for managing and maintaining those legacy environments.

How does Nexus help organizations?

Both business and IT teams benefit from Nexus because the SaaS service provides a unified view of their legacy data without the need to maintain the applications, hardware and software that created it. Nexus is a unified, single global user interface that improves productivity by freeing up IT staff and business continuity teams by simplifying it into a cloud based access point.

These are some of the key advantages to organizations:

• Restore and protect all data: The Nexus platform secures all your legacy data assets irrespective of which past system created them, enabling fast and efficient business continuity and disaster recovery.
• Lower total cost of ownership: Both the OpEx and CapEx related to traditional legacy data management are eliminated, as is the waste of having redundant data stored in different systems.
• Reduce data risk: Because you have a centralized view of all your data from a single cloud-based platform, you can improve both data discovery and compliance by quickly and efficiently identifying data, and allowing the Nexus platform to restore it from whatever format it was created in.
• Unlock agility while accelerating cloud strategies: With organizations pivoting to the cloud, they are increasingly faced with challenges with what to do about their internal tape backup data and systems.  The cloud-based Nexus system allows the simplest, best path to protect, connect and unlock value in legacy data spanning IT environments and geographies.
• Improve data access to foster innovation: An organization’s history is largely sitting on tapes created in the past. These datasets represent some of the largest and richest training datasets for AI and ML, specifically containing data that only that company possesses. Imagine a GPT that knew your company’s entire history. It also means less data fragmentation in silos, faster access to high-quality data, and new ways to gain insights that speed business decision-making, litigation requirements and legislative data retention.

The Nexus platform is a SaaS based data platform based in the cloud; through the Nexus interface, what can you do?

• See a comprehensive set of data from all of your past backups and tape collections: Within the Nexus interface, you search and retrieve data from your legacy backups without the need to maintain the software, hardware or physical tapes that you have created in the past. Rather than maintaining physical data center footprints, tape drive hardware and libraries, and software to manage the tapes, Nexus provides a single user interface that allows you to see your collections in one place.
• Get advanced security: Nexus is based on the major cloud platforms, leveraging their MFA, encryption and other security protocols that provide a robust and zero trust methodology.
• Manage data more simply: Enterprises can easily and seamlessly manage their legacy tapes as well as the policies for data expiry, disposal and legislative requirements in one spot, through a single interface.
• Shift to predictability and simplicity: SaaS based pricing provides cost predictability and eliminates many internal costs incurred by organizations when managing the issue themselves, including:
  • Maintaining legacy tape hardware for just-in-case restores of data where the hardware and tapes are now totally unsupported.
  • Maintaining legacy restore software for just-in-case restores of data where the software is now either unsupported, or the organization is paying for support for no real benefit.
  • Paying offsite tape storage companies like Iron Mountain for storing legacy tapes on shelves where they can be lost, accidentally given to the wrong customer, dropped, or lost in a fire. The Nexus SaaS offering removes any and all need for any physical tapes.
  • Elimination of expensive data center space used to host legacy hardware that may not be used for months or even years, at a time.
  • Power, cooling, connectivity and human management are eliminated as Tape Ark and the Nexus platform do all of the work for you.

How does Nexus help organizations meet their legislative and legal requirements?

Legacy tape based data is a large and complex data holding that often has mixed data retention periods. A single tape may have data you need to keep for seven years mixed with data you need to keep for 100 years. When on physical tape, there is no way to dispose of only part of a single tape. You have to either keep the whole tape or dispose of the whole tape, putting you in violation of your legally binding retention guidelines.

This means that:

• Organizations are exposed to litigation if they keep data for too long or get rid of data too soon. Physical tapes give you no option to manage the data at a granular level.
• Organizations pay for unnecessary storage for data they don’t need to keep which, over a long period, can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted spend.
• Offsite storage companies are not able to assist with your data retention issues and never will while the data stays as physical tapes. The Nexus platform can provide access to far deeper detail; at the file and server level, eliminating the guesswork and uncertainty that physical tapes create.
• Organizations that have lost their tape content catalogs and indexes and don’t know what is on each tape tend to keep everything for fear of throwing out data that is required or legislatively mandated to be retained. Nexus can re-create your catalog, restore the data and remove content you no longer want to retain so that you can get back to only retaining data that you need, or using data you did not know existed.

How is Nexus sold?

Nexus is a SaaS based cloud subscription that is hosted on the leading cloud platforms.

The Nexus SaaS service is sold based on the number of physical tapes you have, the volume of data they contain and the number of environments you need to be supported. The platform pricing allows you to transition from the physical storage of tapes and the management of legacy hardware to a SaaS based service that has the following pricing features:

• Low to no tape entry fees so that you can go from physical storage to Nexus at no upfront costs.
• Restore fees that are only levied when you need a restore – essentially pay for it, when you need it.
• Appropriately tiered cloud based data storage from the major cloud service providers so that when data is not in use, it is stored in the lowest cost tier of cloud storage available.
• Unlimited users can be invited to the Nexus system at no additional cost.
• Automated data retention and removal service that allows you to reduce your storage spend as data becomes available for removal and deletion.
• Segregated billing by department, geography, etc. so that you can allocate costs of the service to cost center you need easily.

Key benefits

• Easy to use: The Tape Ark portal is specifically designed to make accessing your data as easy as possible. Our low-latency platform ensures seamless interaction with your tape to cloud data.
• Convenient: Our tape to cloud service is non-disruptive to your company’s workloads. You can continue your operations uninterrupted while we handle the setup. 
• Cost-saving: Moving your data to the cloud eliminates the cost of expensive and outdated hardware and software from your company’s system. 
• Efficiency: Significantly reduces the time and effort involved in the manual handling of tapes and conducting restore events. What might have taken a few weeks to recover from offsite storage can now be retrieved in a matter of hours with our tape to cloud solution.
• Reduced Exposure: Ensures the integrity of important data by removing the risk of tape deterioration and data loss due to faulty hardware.
• Boost Income: Raises your potential revenue opportunities by putting your assets at your full disposal. You can analyze them for valuable insights or commercialize them as you see fit.
• Environmental: Reduces your company’s carbon footprint by transferring your data center usage to our cloud partners’ centers instead, which operate on renewable energy.
• Air Gap: Our platform offers air gap and immutability as part of its suite of security features.

Embrace the logical move towards efficiency and reliability with our tape to cloud service. Get in touch here to find out more. We welcome all inquiries. 

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Common questions about how Nexus helps

Struggling to maintain legacy tape infrastructure and see no way out?

Do you want to modernize your data archives but feel overwhelmed by their complexity or size?

Are you avoiding taking action due to concerns it will be labor-intensive and time-consuming? 

Rest assured, this isn’t the case with our tape to cloud solution. We hear these doubts all the time. Any big company older than 12 years is probably contending with the same problems, somewhere in the backrooms of its business. They put off addressing it for the reasons above and so their collection unfortunately continues consuming resources year after year, with hardly any return on investment. So many companies are being slowed down by its unwieldy tape collections and all the headaches they can bring, not realizing that there is a way out and that moving off tapes is cheaper too. A company’s past shouldn’t be just a burden; however, for many of these companies, that’s what it’s become. 

Tape Ark’s SaaS based tape to cloud ingest service offers a modern, efficient, and cost-effective solution to migrate your legacy tape data seamlessly into the cloud. Integrating the past into the company’s present to help it move forward. In virtualizing a tape collection, we help companies go lighter and operate more efficiently. Our work paves the way for a new status quo where the company never has to worry about old tapes again. 

 Features

• Tape audit: Not sure exactly what tapes you have in your collection, what they contain or where to begin? No problem. Tape Ark will conduct a thorough tape audit including QR coding, photography, RFID chip reading, and analysis prior to migrating your data.
• Tape management: Alongside our tape to cloud service, we offer ongoing physical tape storage, management and secure destruction & disposal should it be needed.
• No upfront fees: For organizations looking to avoid large capital outlays, we offer tailored plans to suit your business needs.
• Secure & reliable: Tape Ark leverage extensive security protocols including encryption at rest, air gap, immutability and encryption during transfer to ensure your data is protected as we migrate your data to the cloud.
• Hasslefree: Tape Ark connects your existing backup tape application to the virtual tapes, which means no internal retraining or process change is required when you move to our tape to cloud solution.
• Onsite services: Tape Ark services are available globally, with mass ingest facilities located in Australia, India, United Kingdom, USA and Canada. Tape Ark also offers mobilization to customer sites for in-house data ingest (subject to connectivity requirements).
• Tape retrieval: We understand the value of your data archives so we make it a priority that you are never without access. Plans for mid-project tape restores/retrievals are put in place for you to access your data ahead of project completion if needed.

Summary of our cloud based legacy tape management service 

Tape Ark virtualizes part or all of your physical tape collection, preserving your legacy backups to a secure, highly redundant, low-cost Virtual Tape Library (VTL) based in the cloud platform of your choice. The end result is a tape, hardware and software free tape collection available in the cloud at the click of a button. The backup software, tape drives and tapes themselves exist as virtual copies in the cloud, eliminating the need for expensive equipment from the company’s backup environments. Even the original appearance of the media is documented and preserved, allowing exact replicas of the physical tape collection to be reproduced in the future if desired. 

Customers can access the Tape Ark Nexus customer portal to browse their archive, request restores and delete data that is no longer needed. Nexus is available on multi-year tailored plans and is the perfect solution for companies with long-term data retention requirements. It helps remove some of the overheads associated with managing a physical tape library, including data center space, paying offsite storage fees, and all of the licensing and maintenance that forms a part of a company’s current system. It is the logical move for companies facing these issues.