Google: Tape Ark migrates tape-based sports broadcast to Google Cloud

Tape Ark has moved a significant collection of tape-based sports video footage to Google Cloud. The cloud ingest of the collection measures over 40 petabytes of video footage. By moving it to the cloud, the broadcaster will be able save time and money on the maintenance of the collection including the legacy tape infrastructure, software licenses, data center space, and its associated power and cooling costs, as well as the physical management of their on-premise systems.

“Content sitting idle on tape media is an asset that needs to be liberated to the cloud to take full advantage of the opportunities it presents. This is not only the case for sports content, but also for news, health, research, weather, banking, and insurance to name just a few. Tape Ark has now liberated almost 1 exabyte of content in the last three years, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Guy Holmes, founder and CEO of Tape Ark.

While tape storage has typically been viewed as a legacy storage solution, it is still used in certain contexts. For example, in March 2023, Spectra Logic deployed an exascale Tape library at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, the US. The storage was deployed to support the research with the Rubin Observatory which is conducting a 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, collecting light from celestial objects and transforming it into data.