The IT Nerd

Here’s some 2025 predictions from members of the Active Archive Alliance.

Modern Object Storage Will Expand to Include Long-Term Tape Solutions

The explosion of Generative AI and increased demand for unstructured data retention is exceeding modern IT budget growth.  Standardized object storage interfaces are making it easy to move data, but object storage was designed as a single tier utilizing hard disk drives.  Tiering will become a standard requirement for active data object storage vendors.  Modern object storage solutions will expand support to include tape and other long-term storage mediums as an object storage deep archive target, at a fraction of the cost of cloud archives.  Cloud will continue to be part of the hybrid data protection strategy. The results will be lowered costs for organizations storing Petabytes of data.

 – Mark Hill, Business Line Executive Data Retention Infrastructure, IBM

Sustainability Makes a Comeback in Data Storage with Active Archives

Despite daily examples of the devastating effects of climate change, broader corporate sustainability initiatives have in many cases moved off center stage due to unachievable and overly aggressive goals with poor return on investment. Meanwhile, in the IT industry, the shiny new thing is AI with its energy intensive GPUs dwarfing the energy requirements of traditional CPUs. AI also requires massive volumes of data to feed its training models and more data gets generated in the process that may never be deleted even after it goes cold. Sustainable active archive solutions with intelligent data management capabilities can leverage ultra energy-efficient and extremely cost-effective tiers of storage such as S3 compatible object-based tape libraries. This will be needed to offset the voracious energy consumption of truly cutting-edge and breakthrough AI applications as the AI age evolves in 2025 and beyond.

-Rich Gadomski, Head of Tape Evangelism, FUJIFILM North America Corp., Data Storage Solutions

Active Archive Based on Standards and Established Tape Technology: Essential for Future Data Centers

Standardization plays a major role in the data center sector. This applies not only to hardware, but also to software. The need for data archiving in data centers will increase as data volumes grow rapidly due to applications such as AI. For example, active archive concepts based on established tape technology and standardized object-based software interfaces will be used to enable the active use of archived data. Active archives based on scalable and rack-mountable tape libraries that are designed for use in data centers and can be integrated via standardized software interfaces such as S3, will become indispensable in future data centers.

– Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems

Revolutionizing Data Management: AI-Driven Solutions for Smart Storage and Seamless Access.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize data storage and active archives by enhancing efficiency and accessibility. As data volumes soar, we can optimize storage management by predicting usage patterns and minimizing costs, potentially making decisions about how and where to store data at the point of creation. In the realm of active archives, AI can analyze and prioritize data, ensuring frequently accessed information is readily available while less critical data is stored cost-effectively. Automated classification, tagging, and indexing could simplify the search process, allowing for intelligent data handling. For example, sensitive intellectual property could be air-gapped to tape for security, while short-term, frequently accessed data could be stored in a cloud tier. This strategic approach could lead to significant improvements in data

management, enabling organizations to respond more effectively to their needs and streamline their operations.

– Paul Luppino, Director, Global Digital Solutions, Iron Mountain

AI Workloads Will Fuel More Storage Disaggregation

As the AI train keeps moving full-steam ahead, more companies will realize that server-bound storage will be less cost effective and at times inadequate when compared to what can be accomplished via disaggregated storage. Simply put, disaggregated storage is external storage, attached to the server via SAS or fabric. This disaggregation has been proven to deliver the performance and capacity required to meet the requirements of demanding GPU-related workloads which are at the heart of AI and machine learning processes. Disaggregating storage from the server accomplishes two key things: (1) it enables storage to be shared across multiple servers offering greater flexibility and utilization of storage resources, and (2) demonstrations show that disaggregated storage delivers the performance needed to keep GPU processing fully saturated. Over time these external storage architectures will become standard with HDD for active archives and with flash for performance workloads and will ultimately migrate to fabric as opposed to SAS given the convenience and distance benefits of fabrics.

-Mark Pastor, Platform Product Management, Western Digital

 AI-based Applications Fuel the Rise of Accessible Cold Storage, Enabling the Processing of Data Within Seconds.

The digitalization of our everyday lives has created the need for immutable records and the permanent capture of sensor data of all kinds of applications such as autonomous cars, medical diagnostics, Smart IoT, images, and videos.  Most of this cold-born data is often retained indefinitely for personal or liability reasons or later monetization, including browsing user data, medical risk assessment, and training data to enhance AI. This data must be stored as cost-effectively as possible; otherwise, newly invested AI-based business models will struggle to turn a profit. In the future, large chunks of data will quickly be heated up to enable ML and AI-powered tools to generate insights on large datasets. The need for fast, accessible, high-performance Active Archive solutions is obvious and will drive accelerating demand in 2025!

-Martin Kunze, CMO and Co-Founder, Cerabyte

Tape Enables More Cost-Effective Active Archives in 2025

The percentage of total data that goes on tape will increase within active archive environments.  I don’t just mean more data will go on tape than before, which has been the case for a while.  I’m saying more data will go on tape thanks to its cost, energy and long-term reliability advantages, when compared to the amount of data going on disk.

 –W. Curtis Preston, Technology Evangelist, S2|Data

The Rise of Storage Virtualization and the Data Fabric

As organizations look to optimize their storage strategies in 2025, the rise of storage virtualization is making it easier to interconnect various data storage technologies. Businesses can maximize their existing investments and avoid vendor lock-in by leveraging a data fabric—an architecture that unifies cloud, disk, tape, and flash storage into a single, logical namespace. This trend towards virtualization allows for a more flexible approach to data management, enabling businesses to mix and match technologies to meet specific needs. For example, high-performance workloads can run on flash storage while colder data is moved to tape in an active archive. The ability to integrate various storage solutions seamlessly will be a key enabler for organizations aiming to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and scale their operations.

-Jason Lohrey, CEO, Arcitecta

AI’s Rising Energy Costs: Why Data Centers Will Be Turning to Tape Storage

As AI continues to reshape industries, the energy demands on data centers are intensifying. AI servers consume up to 14 times more power than traditional systems, raising both operational costs and environmental concerns. In response, the focus must shift to energy-efficient solutions, and magnetic tape—a 70-year-old technology—offers a relevant answer. Modern tape storage is not only highly durable but also incredibly energy-efficient, particularly when compared to disk storage. By offloading cold data to tape in an active archive, data centers can free up energy for AI workloads, maximizing efficiency. As energy becomes a factor potentially limiting the growth of AI, businesses that embrace sustainable practices will gain a competitive edge in 2025 and beyond.

-Ted Oade, Director of Product Marketing, Spectra Logic

Trend Towards Hybrid Active Archives

As the volume of stored digital data increases year on year, many organizations increasingly turn to public cloud storage. This is true for active archives because storing in cloud object storage is scalable, secure and, most importantly, is convenient. However, for large archives, it is a costly option. For this reason, we are seeing a trend towards hybrid storage solutions where data is stored both on premises and in the cloud. This can minimize egress, and it avoids costly fees when an organization decides it must migrate its content from one cloud provider to an alternative, whether that be a different provider or an on-premises solution.

-Phil Storey, XenData CEO

Tape-based Active Archive Complements the Fastest AI Storage

QStar believes the use of AI to provide added insight into multiple types of data will be a major driving force in many IT departments over the next year and into the future. The use of tier 1 primary storage and new tier 0 GPU based storage will require significant data sets or project data to be available for relatively short periods of time during processing. At other times, this data has to be stored securely and be readily available when next needed, but also stored at low-cost, due to the size of the data sets involved.

Multi-node tape-based active archive solutions provide everything an AI environment requires, by using many tape drives in parallel to increase significantly raw performance. Tape media is the lowest cost and most secure form of storage. AI applications can choose to access this data through a file system (SMB or NFS) or S3 API protocol.

-David Thomson – SVP Sales and Marketing (QStar Technologies) 

Healthcare: Using AI in Cyber Risk Reduction

Although artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of discussions in active archiving for healthcare, continuing to use AI to help in the cyber security world will be a must in 2025.  Hackers continue to advance AI technology to develop more complicated and complex hacking initiatives and ethical hackers are required to do the same to prevent it. The push for interoperability in healthcare will require advanced AI hacking prevention techniques and 2025 is going to be a big year for prevention and balance: How to share data and still keep it secure. Concerns over AI’s ability to learn and evaluate critical thinking processes are not unfounded. Patient safety is already a concern as hackers try to infiltrate medical devices and this will definitely need to be a focus in 2025.  2024 provided good examples of areas of vulnerability. In 2025, initiatives should be increased to include analysis of these gaps in protection, and the budgets increased to provide funding to actually close them.

-Kel Pults, DHA, MSN, RN, NI-BC, NREMT Chief Clinical Officer and VP Government Strategy, MediQuant