Fighting Intertia: Making Your Move From LTO Tape to Cloud Object Storage

If there’s one thing every content owner knows it’s the value of their content. Sports teams, film studios, and production agencies trade on little else than what they’ve created. What they might not be aware of is that where their content is stored is almost as important as the content itself.  

The world of content is moving towards accessibility, and that goes for content consumers and creators alike. Cloud object storage is unrivaled when it comes to balancing storage cost and data accessibility. Its ability to store content cost-effectively at scale and rapidly access content when and where you need it gives content owners access to a world of use cases and technologies that not only improve media workflows but open up content to new revenue opportunities.  

If cloud storage is a bridge to the large and ever-growing media ecosystem, LTO tape is a cul-de-sac.  Its most common use is being a cost-friendly home for archival content that storage admins want to protect but may never access. When these storage drives were bought, they were the top of the line for long-term storage. Now, the newly announced LTO 10 spells the end of the line for formats more than two generations behind. Worse: there’s currently no mention of backwards compatibility of any kind for new LTO generation 10 drives. With obsolescence in the air, it’s time to reevaluate our relationship to LTO tape and chart a new course that involves LTO tape data migration to the cloud.

Getting the ball rolling

Content owners know the value tape storage brings them. It’s cheap, it’s reliable, it’s standard. They probably know its drawbacks, too. It’s slow, it’s clunky, it’s out of step with the rest of the world. Tape is great at one thing: being a long-term parking lot for footage you may never see again, and that’s the problem.

By design, when content is on tape, there is not much you can do with it (until you retrieve it back into a primary storage platform). . It's not being viewed by any audiences, it’s not being searched on streaming platforms, and no editors are compiling packages that include it. Tapes are great for preserving content lifespans, but the lifespan of a piece of content is more than its preservation on film. It’s its continued relevance within the media ecosystem.

The challenge of LTO tape is inertia—the tendency of objects at rest to stay at rest. If you’ve already invested in laying your content to rest on tape, it’s hard to get that to change. There’s not much cost associated with keeping footage on tape, and making a tape migration to cloud storage comes at a cost of both time and budget.

But Newton’s first law can give us the solution to this, too. It may take a significant push to get the ball rolling but once data is moved off tape, it’s much easier for it to remain in circulation. On disk or in the cloud, content is now free to interact with all the applications and mechanisms that keep it active, moving, and generating value.

Changing with the times

What we used to look to tape for has largely been supplanted by other technologies and the ecosystems that surround them, ecosystems that improve the way we work and the business around content ownership. The work we do with archival content—cataloging, redistributing, and compiling—is no longer best served by the LTO format.

The world of content is moving toward having access to what you need when and where you need it, and the cloud is where it’s most easily accessed. Viewing, sharing, and searching all happen online. If your content isn’t there, it can’t do that work.

Searchability

For organizations with large content volumes, search ranks in importance much like the Dewey Decimal System ranks for library systems. Unfortunately, LTO tape technology is extremely limited in its searchability. The format lacks support for detailed metadata which is critical in finding what you’re looking for.

Cloud object storage boasts advanced search options with support for detailed metadata. Content owners can locate footage not only by name and date but also by location, color profile, camera type, and countless other parameters that open editors and other stakeholders to a new world of granular search.

Advances in AI and automated metadata tagging are enabling an entirely new way to search your catalogs. The ability to query by content—say, Albert Pujols at-bats, silver Toyota vehicles, or landscapes with mountain ranges—is a massive paradigm shift for editors and content managers. The same way Google redefined our relationship with the Internet, this level of AI-powered searchability will redefine our relationship with our owned content.

Monetization

Today, there is no shortage of ways to monetize your content. Streaming services, commercial licensing, and social media are all avenues for content owners to collect royalties from their existing library and keep their content fresh. The incentive here is obvious, but the real sell is the low effort required. To capitalize on these opportunities, no new content is required; your existing library just needs to be filtered, transformed, and shared.

Content that stays on tape is effectively sitting on the bench when it could be out on the field. Though keeping content on low-cost LTO tapes could be a cost-saving measure, consider the opportunity cost this inactive data generates by not contributing any value to your organization. It might not cost much to store, but anything worth keeping had better be worth what it costs to keep it. The push to cloud is the essential first step toward continued profitability, even turning a storage expense into a profitable investment.

Access at scale

While LTO tape is an incredibly reliable and cost-efficient storage format, it’s still subject to the same physical capacity limitations of other storage hardware. With a never-ending stream of content to store and preserve, content owners must continually confront the costly upgrade cycle whenever their devices near their limits. LTO drives are often marketed with two displayed capacities of vastly differing sizes for compressed and native-format or RAW data. In the case of LTO 10 drives, their maximum capacity is 90 TB of compressed data and only 36 TB native. Since media files are too big to compress, content owners must settle for the far more limited uncompressed capacity. This is a difference of 167% of total available storage lost.

Only users in the same geographic location as the drives themselves can even access the stored content, and recalling files from the physical, linear storage format can take anywhere from a few minutes to hours, dramatically stifling its usability.

Cloud object storage offers the bottomless scalability a large media library requires. Content owners are free to ingest additional content without taking on any new upfront hardware purchases. High read and write speeds allow unprecedented accessibility to entire volumes of content from any Internet-connected device.

This global reach is becoming increasingly valuable as productions span the globe, and the post-production process becomes decentralized. Solutions like Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage grant total accessibility to content by waiving the egress and access fees common in hyperscale cloud environments, empowering a remote workforce to create without limits.

The (inevitable) migration

Of course, a move to the cloud isn’t such a simple undertaking. Large files take time to upload and index, and the entire process can eat up valuable bandwidth. In fact, the difficulty of the move is often what keeps long-term LTO users where they are.

The truth is, an LTO tape data migration may be coming whether you like it or not. The latest LTO 10 format has so far not confirmed any backwards compatibility with previous versions. Any new LTO 10 tapes wouldn’t work with a drive from LTO 9 or below, and new drives won’t play with old tapes. Upgrading to the new format will require new drives and a full migration of existing content to new LTO 10 tapes to support it. Either way, content owners using older LTO formats will soon face an inevitable migration. The question is, will it be to a more-of-the-same tape library or a shift to the unlimited potential of the cloud?

Though it may seem daunting as a whole, a migration to the cloud is best taken in small steps. If you want to expedite a migration, there are tools that can help. Physical data transfer appliances can be filled with data and shipped directly to your cloud provider of choice and file acceleration services can dramatically speed up ingest over public Internet.

Conclusion

Historically, LTO tape has been a cost-effective way to preserve content for the long term. But we are in a new era where data is our most valuable resource. Organizations of any size and shape are finding new uses for older, archived content – from monetizing archival footage, gleaning new business insights with analytics tools, to training AI models. Data in LTO tape libraries are not available for any of those purposes and you’re caught in a cycle of upgrading to new formats.

Don't misjudge your content’s importance or its potential. The cloud is your content’s gateway to a new world of possibilities. The sooner your content is housed in a cloud-backed media library, the sooner you can tap into all the potential that awaits.

Our latest white paper explains just how to make it happen. With a step-by-step migration guide and best practices from cloud storage experts, you’ll have what you need for a smooth transition from tape to cloud.