Migration from legacy archives was a major theme at NAB this year. Many of the visitors to the XenData booth have large legacy LTO tape archives that they want to convert to the Cloud or to modern on-premises LTO-8 archives. In many cases, there is an urgency to convert, driven by escalating maintenance costs for their legacy systems. The challenge with these migrations is that the tapes are typically written in proprietary formats and the archives are in production use. It is a bit like changing a tire while driving the car!

Migrating to the latest generation of LTO provides huge savings because the massive 12 TB capacity of LTO-8 cartridges means that the size of robotic tape libraries can greatly reduce running costs. It also means that the industry standard LTFS format can be used which avoids future vendor lock-in when the next migration is needed.

For many, the Cloud is an excellent choice as the new destination for their archives especially for those that need to access their content from multiple locations or take advantage of the new analytic tools that run in the Cloud. Dean Paron from Microsoft has written an excellent blog addressing this topic. You can check it out at this link here: Offline media import for Azure