OVHcloud Launches Cold Archive – Offering Resilient, Long-Term Tape Based Storage

OVHcloud, the European cloud leader, today announces the general availability of Cold Archive, its new archiving solution leveraging 8+4 erasure coding, adding to its growing Public Cloud portfolio of storage offers. Designed to meet customers’ expectations and scaling needs, OVHcloud Cold Archive tackles the challenge of exponential data growth in Public Cloud environments year on year.

A vision for long-term storage
Engineered for long-term data retention, OVHcloud Cold Archive is an innovative and sustainable storage solution for infrequently accessed data. From data protection to archiving, Cold Archive is designed for use cases including but not limited to media companies that sit on thousands of terabytes of video libraries without the need for continuous access, healthcare companies legally bound to keep their data for decades or companies of all kinds looking to improve resiliency in a multi-cloud scenario with another set of their data in a different location.

Not only does Cold Archive addresses storage needs for industry compliance and data conservation of financial or HR records but it is also a perfect match for businesses that understand their current data has untapped potential. As companies collect more and more data, they might not immediately extract its business value. In the long run, this data might prove valuable in yet-to-be-defined workloads built around AI, analytics or simply with future business endeavours.

OVHcloud Cold Archive is a unique and cost-effective way to preserve that data. It is equally ideally suited to answer data sovereignty concerns in line with OVHcloud’s commitment to providing a trusted cloud, offering users total control over their data.

IBM and Atempo at the heart of Cold Archive
At the heart of OVHcloud storage data centres is IBM best-in-class hardware tape technology. Leveraging IBM tape readers and library automation, storage data centres
can store up to 3 Exabytes of data per site with up to 18 000 tapes per library.

“IBM is delighted to work with OVHcloud on this generation of cold storage solutions that leverage our industry-leading tape technology,” said Jeff Barber, VP, Storage HW Sales, IBM.

Atempo provides the Miria software solution to manage high-density IBM tape libraries assisting in the background with archiving and restoring, in a seamless way for the user.

“We are delighted to work with OVHcloud on this new generation of data archiving solution, delivering a fully integrated solution that is simple, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient. Managing ever-growing amounts of critical data is now compatible with sustainability, thanks to the combined expertise of Atempo and OVHcloud,” said Luc d’Urso, CEO Atempo.

A unique and resilient infrastructure leveraging storage tapes
Based on a fully resilient architecture spread on 4 dedicated storage data centres, the solution benefits from new select sites built from the ground up by the OVHcloud design office using 100% 3D sketching to further optimize building conception and deployment.

OVHcloud Cold Archive is an offsite solution that employs tapes where each storage data centre is at least 100 kilometres apart and located in France. Totalling 4 storage data centres, Cold Archive is a geo-dispersed storage solution able to withstand the loss of a complete region.

“We are thrilled to launch Cold Archive, leveraging the Group’s talents in various fields to offer a resilient long-term storage solution that proves to be sustainable. Furthermore, we are offering a sovereign solution immune to extraterritorial laws. All at an unmatched price on the market.” said Yaniv Fdida, Chief Product Officer OVHcloud.

With an average lifespan of more than a decade compared to conventional hard disk drives or SSD, tapes provide additional key benefits such as zero power: once data is written, there’s no actual power for the tape when it’s stored away in the library. This offline state contributes to the overall security of the archive, along with existing data immutability, user policies and data protection measures.

A standardized archiving solution
Cold Archive is addressable through the S3 API. Clients will leverage their existing knowledge, making data migration easier. For improved security, data is encrypted at the object storage bucket level with AES-256 server-side encryption based on customer-provided encryption keys.

OVHcloud Cold Archive provides trusted and secure long-term storage that scales from terabytes to petabytes of data and beyond, benefiting from an attractive pricing model that includes internal traffic as well as API calls. Supporting industry-standard APIs, Cold Archive exposes tape storage solutions to infra as code tools.

Unmatched pricing at 0,0013 EUR per Gigabyte
Cold Archive is available today for customers in Europe, Canada and APAC. Combining the longevity and resiliency of tape-based solutions with replication of content by erasure coding on 4 data centres, the proposition has a strong performance/price ratio.

The pricing model is set at 0,0013 EUR per Gigabyte for an archive with a 6 months commitment.