Seagate’s Lyve Data Services will use per-customer, tape-to-cloud project pricing in its data migration centres but commercial details are opaque.
The company last week announced Lyve Data Services (LDS) in conjunction with Tape Ark, a Perth, Australia tape migration specialist. LDS will use Tape Ark’s software and services to migrate data from off-site tape vaults to the public cloud. Seagate’s two data migration centres, one in Amsterdam, Holland, the other in Oklahoma, will use many Seagate drives in their operations.
What does this service cost? Seagate is not saying. “Each project is evaluated and priced on specific client needs,” the company told us. “We cannot disclose specifics on the financial aspects of the agreement which remain confidential between Seagate and Tape Ark.”
In other words, it is old-style pay-what-we-think-you-can-afford pricing.
According to Seagate, a billion tapes are housed offline and moving their data to the public cloud affords easier access, mining and analytics. All well and good but this is small beer to Seagate, an $11bn/year corporation and one of the world’s top two disk drive manufacturers.
What is Seagate’s angle? Here is its answer. “Seagate Lyve Data Services is about helping our customers solve their data challenges. Our newest offering in migration is a continuation of that mission. Together with TapeArk, Seagate will help customers unlock the value of their data by making it more available, secure, and efficient through this service.”
Statement of intent
“Helping our customers solve their data challenges,” is a fine marketing statement – as is enabling customers to “unlock the value of their data.” But they tell us little.
Google teamed with Iron Mountain in April 2016 for an LTO tape to Google Cloud migration in April 2016. Two years on, we have no inkling of how much business this is doing. Perhaps Seagate knows better?
We can assume that Seagate detects strong demand to move tapes out of the likes of Iron Mountain and pour their data into the welcoming embrace of AWS, Azure and Google.
Lyve Data Services will then become a massive data migration on-ramp to the public cloud, where the data could well be stored on tape again.
