Insurgo, for a better tape lifecycle approach

I met Insurgo at the Storage Technology Showcase conference in March in Tucson, AZ, and I realized that that team had a very needed service most of time ignored by users themselves and potentially vendors. They address the lifecycle of tape and as you can imagine it represents a huge business opportunity for decades. So I decided to invite to the recent IT Press Tour in Berlin end of June.

So what’s the problem or challenge with tape? Tape itself doesn’t create a problem but its lifecycle and how they’re disposed, recycle or destroy could introduce some questions that must be addressed.

This is the mission of Insurgo, a Welsh company founded in 2009.

As they realized that degaussing, shredding, incineration or landfill solved partially the need, they decided to design and develop a dedicated solution for essentially 2 usages: recycling of with a 100% guarantee cleaning process that invite tape owners to safely dispose tape or sell them on the second market and destruction for definitive elimination.

Speaking with Insurgo we learn that these tapes - LTO and 2592 families - embed a CM chip to store some specific information and they must be integrated in these processes. Even after tape degaussing, the CM chip continues to contain potentially sensitive information or information users don’t want them to be exposed or shared outside their perimeter. Same thing for shredding that appears to be not enough. Incineration could be a solution for total destruction but the question of the rest still exist.

As said Insurgo has developed 2 solutions, the first is named KIT and the second SWAT.

KIT for “Kill Information on Tape” exist for LOT and 3592 tapes and is certified by several official organizations. It fully erases CM chip, doesn’t damage the tape or servo tracks and offers a secured lifecycle. It works today up to LTO8 and LTO9 is under preparation being the last LTO level available on the market.

On the other hand, SWAT for “Securely Wipes All Tracks” was developed to fully destroyed the tape, I mean data, CM chip and servo tracks. The tape can’t be used any more, it can be safely put in a bin even a public one, there is no chance at all to read any data from it.

These 2 processes are very fast and according to Insurgo itself KIT takes 6.7 minutes for LTO7 and 5.4 minutes for LTO6 and SWAT 4.8 minutes for LTO6.

In addition to that, the team offered some inventory tool to scan a tape and its CM chip in just a second without any drive need. It generates reports to facilitate the tape inventory tracking and confirmation of recycle or destroy actions. This service is named Investigo and complements perfectly the 2 others.