Tape Ark re-imagines the way physical offsite data storage is imagined, by changing the data storage landscape and providing high volume migration of aging corporate data from archive tape media directly to the cloud using public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services.
Holmes said the physical storage of legacy tapes and backup data has become the "elephant in the boardroom" that no one wanted to address, and as the data seats become more complicated, increasing in volume, age, and resource requirements while becoming less accessible and continuing to deteriorate and erode.
Through the use of Tape Ark's scalable and automated tape migration infrastructure and with public cloud offerings like Amazon's gateway and Virtual Tape Library (Gateway-VTL), legacy tapes can be seamlessly migrated to the cloud and then accessed through the Tape Ark client portal.
Holmes said Tape Ark's only costs to clients would be ongoing monthly cloud storage costs, which he said would be usually less than the physical storage costs in an offsite data vault.
"The reading of the physical tapes is free of charge, making the transition from conventional vault storage to Tape Ark a no-brainer," he said.
Holmes said he wanted to bring management of archive tape data into the 21st century.
Holmes has spent more than 20 years working on preserving data, and has been responsible for managing the recovery and restoration of millions of tapes for organisations such as NASA, The Australian Federal Government and the Ethiopian government.
"I have personally seen enough old tapes and heard enough complaining from every corner of the industry about how complicated access to legacy tape can be, and frankly, I have had enough of it" Holmes said.
"This solution finally disrupts the age old tape vault storage concept that have become billion dollar businesses out of providing nothing more than air conditioned rooms and courier vans. These days, paying for offsite tape storage for legacy data is simply crazy.
"It can take days to retrieve and restore data using the old school tape vault and offsite backup rotation services that are so prolific in the industry. And then just getting a tape back from your vault is typically only the start of the painful and time consuming restore process for many companies."
He said Tape Ark would use the cloud as a vault and the internet to replace the courier van, cutting access to legacy data down to minutes instead of days.
The service also provides a complete restore service eliminating the need to maintain legacy software and hardware for those "just in case" restores.
Tape Ark is Holmes' fifth start up, having previously been the founder of both an offsite vault storage business, and also a digital data storage and tape recovery business - both of which he has now sold.
Tape Ark was born out of the corporate data services division of SpectrumData after Katalyst Data Management purchased SpectrumData's oil and gas division.
Holmes said Tape Ark was not directly providing services to oil and gas exploration in Australia and New Zealand, as that segment is serviced by Katalyst.
