Perth's Tape Ark partners with Equinix to improve cloud migrations

Perth-headquartered IT services provider Tape Ark has partnered with Equinix to advance its digital infrastructure as part of its next stage of expansion.

Tape Ark specialises in migrating large volumes of legacy tape-based data to the cloud, across industries of media and entertainment, healthcare, mining, education and research and the public sector.

As part of the partnership, Tape Ark aims to improve the performance of its tape to cloud migration services and meeting local data sovereignty needs.

Tape Ark selected Platform Equinix in order to reduce latency and improve connectivity so that customers can virtualise their physical tape collections and preserve their backups in a secure Virtual Tape Library.

According to Tape Ark, in order to migrate multi-petabyte data collections to the cloud in real-time, a network-dense digital infrastructure in key locations that are adjacent to all major cloud service providers is required.

Equinix was selected by Tape Ark due to its large geographical footprint, interconnected ecosystems, digital infrastructure, physical security and connectivity to all the leading cloud service providers.

This allows Tape Ark to design customisable infrastructure, where its facilities can be managed through Platform Equinix.

Tape Ark is leveraging Equinix Fabric and Equinix Network Edge, as well as Equinix International Business Exchange data centre in Canada, to connect directly to public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Tape Ark is currently moving over 300Pb of data to the cloud for a meteorology organisation in Europe to conduct weather modelling analysis.

In the next three to five years Tape Ark plans to deploy in more than 10 Equinix IBX facilities around the world, including Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Dublin, Mumbai, Sydney and Perth as major data ingest locations.

“To support our global expansion, we require access to world-class, secure hosting of our end-to-end data migration services, which is Equinix,” Tape Ark chief executive and president Guy Holmes said.

“The Equinix brand is something we want to be associated with and this collaboration provides us with facilities in all the right locations we need, with extremely fast and direct connection to all the major cloud service providers where we can move very large data collections,” he added.

Equinix Australia managing director Guy Danskine said: “we’re delighted that Tape Ark has put its trust in Equinix as they enter the next phase of their business expansion, and we look forward to supporting their needs as they continue the important work of liberating data collections that can help the society discover new knowledge and develop breakthrough innovations for social good.”