Sold: Australia's most unconventional data centre

Cloud computing has made its mark again, with the sale of one of Australia’s more unconventional commercial data centres – housing tape drives dating back to the 1960s.

SpectrumData has sold the Perth facility to focus on its AWS-hosted service. While it will retain an impressive array of its own legacy equipment, it is offloading a “vast collection” of tools in the Perth facility used to recover and preserve data from out-dated and deteriorating tapes.

Its collection spans more than 50 years of tape and data storage technology, including an array of seven-, nine- and 21-track open reel technology through to 4mm and 8mm DAT & Exabyte tapes and 3480/3490/3590 technologies.

As well as being used to recover data from deteriorating tapes owned by oil and gas companies, the reel-to-reel equipment has also been used in several recovery efforts with public significance. This includes efforts to recover data from “lunar dust detector” experiments recorded onto 7 track magnetic tape during NASA lunar missions, and the recovery of data from army tapes used during the Vietnam War.

The Perth facility has been sold to Canadian oil and gas data centre operator Katalyst Data Management for an undisclosed amount, along with various other SpectrumData assets. The Australian company will now focus on corporate data services from its Melbourne office.

The sale could be seen as somewhat symbolic of the cloud computing era, given that SpectrumData is now focussing on investments it has made in its AWS-hosted service.

While the Australian firm will retain its own equipment for recovering data from old tapes, on the storage side it has been pitching its AWS-hosted “virtual tape drive” as a way to avoid the risks of relying on old tape archives.

The service is pitched as a faster and cheaper alternative to companies housing their own tapes for longterm storage offsite, and uses Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier.

SpectrumData’s geoscience service division will be rebranded KDM SpectrumData, with SpectrumData founder and director Guy Holmes taking on the role of KDM SpectrumData senior vice president Asia-Pacific during a handover period.

Holmes has an adventurous CV, listing service as a combat medic for the US army, cardiac technician at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, foundation of data management company Access Information Management, and the completion of a management buyout of SpectrumData.