OVHcloud launches Cold Archive

OVHcloud has introduced Cold Archive, its new archiving solution leveraging 8+4 erasure coding, adding to its growing Public Cloud portfolio of storage offers. Designed to meet customers’ expectations and scaling needs, OVHcloud Cold Archive tackles the challenge of exponential data growth in Public Cloud environments year on year.

Engineered for long-term data retention, OVHcloud Cold Archive is a sustainable storage solution for infrequently accessed data.

IBM and Atempo at the heart of Cold Archive

At the heart of OVHcloud storage data centres is IBM best-in-class hardware tape technology. Leveraging IBM tape readers and library automation, storage data centers

can store up to 3 Exabytes of data per site with up to 18 000 tapes per library.

“IBM is delighted to work with OVHcloud on this generation of cold storage solutions that leverage our industry-leading tape technology.” said Jeff Barber, VP, Storage HW Sales, IBM

Atempo provides the Miria software solution to manage high density IBM tape libraries assisting in the background with archiving and restoring, in a seamless way for the user.

Based on a fully resilient architecture spread on 4 dedicated storage data centres, OVHcloud Cold Archive is an offsite solution that employs tapes where each storage data centre is at least 100 kilometers apart and located in France. Cold Archive is a geo-dispersed storage solution able to withstand the loss of a region.

“We are thrilled to launch Cold Archive, leveraging the Group’s talents in various fields to offer a resilient long term storage solution that proves to be sustainable. Furthermore, we are offering a sovereign solution immune to extraterritorial laws. All at an unmatched price on the market.” said Yaniv Fdida, Chief Product Officer OVHcloud.

With an average lifespan of more than a decade compared to conventional hard disk drives or SSD, tapes provide additional key benefits such as zero power: once data is written, no power is required for the tape when stored in the library. This offline state contributes to the overall security of the archive, along with existing data immutability, user policies and data protection measures.

A standardized archiving solution

Cold Archive is addressable through the S3 API. Clients will leverage their existing knowledge, making data migration easier. For improved security, data is encrypted at the object storage bucket level with AES-256 server-side encryption based on customer-provided encryption keys.

OVHcloud Cold Archive provides a secure long-term storage that scales from terabytes to petabytes of data and beyond, benefiting from an attractive pricing model that includes internal traffic as well as API calls. Supporting industry standard APIs, Cold Archive exposes tape storage solutions to infra as code tools.

From data protection to archiving, Cold Archive is designed for use cases including but not limited to media companies that sit on thousands of terabytes of video libraries without the need for continuous access, healthcare companies legally bound to keep their data for decades or companies of all kinds looking to improve resiliency in a multi-cloud scenario with another set of their data in a different location.