Storing the next 30 years

How has the perception of storage changed over the last few years?

We are storing a lot more at the individual and corporate level. At the individual level, what tends to happen is that people are not adequately protecting their data, which is a real issue. There is also a challenge around what needs to be backed up and what doesn't. With home users it's not just about digital photos, it's also tax records.

Another interesting area is migration. The more laws passed on how long you need to retain data, the more actively clients are looking for these solutions to migrate their data. We are particularly excited about that from a corporate perspective.

Data recovery can be considered as damaged media versus the retrieval of old media. We do both of those. We have a clean room where special equipment is used to take apart a hard drive that is broken, reassemble it and overcome physical problems with the hard drive. We get a lot of inquiries around recovering formatting or logical error with the hard drive and our business in that area is building up significantly.

Who are SpectrumData's competitors?

There are probably three companies of great notoriety that do data format conversions around the world. It is a tough market to gauge. The two other companies in the top three are situated in Houston, Texas, and they are solely focused on oil and gas data. Since I came on-board in October, we are focusing on building the corporate and government side of the business. For corporate data, none of the traditional IT integrators or services companies do data format conversion because it requires a properly formatted ISO process. You need to know what you are doing and have access to legacy equipment like old tape drives, but also the different software backup products along with the tools and techniques to repair those old tape drives.

What are the challenges for tape technology going forward?

If you look at the IT industry, there are always going to be new technologies. When a new processor comes out, the data isn't affected, but when it comes to storage platforms, it is where information sits. Tape is designed as a long-term archival medium, and is expected to live for another 30 years, but will the tape drives still be available? Will the software formats be available to recover the data? That is increasingly the challenge.