Fujifilm Recording Media promotes Kangaroo

Fujifilm Recording Media, the tape manufacturer giant and industrial reference, joined The IT Press Tour last week in Rome. It was the opportunity for the vendor's team to detail Kangaroo, its data archiving solution, integrated in a pretty unique mobile unit. It came from the obvious fact that hybrid configurations are real and really liked by end-users able to mix both of best worlds.

It still is the case that cold data, typically backup and archived data, normally stored on secondary storage, are not systematically maintained on cold storage. This situation has a significant impact on the TCO of this protection environment. At the same time, volumes are accumulated especially when you consider archiving data with long retention period. And it appears obviously that one of the best media for that is tape being a passive media by nature. At the same time, the LTO roadmap was disappointed with capacity delivered not aligned with what was presented and expected. A LTO9 offers today 18TB raw and 45TB compressed with a optimistic 2.5:1 ratio. But he capacity advantage the tape had in the past disappeared, recent HDDs reach 28TB and even SSDs pass the 60TB barrier, of course cost is not aligned but it is worth mentioning that point.

Let's focus and detail Kangaroo. It starts with the idea that data archiving requires a cold storage approach able to deliver a very low TCO but also resiliency, scalability, efficiency and easy integration. And don't forget the ransomware protection with a natural air gap. Fujifilm team designs a very integrated solution coupling in-house software with partners hardware like servers, disk storage, IBM tape drives and BDT tape library or autoloader. The minimum capacity is 1PB so clearly it targets enterprises or SME who generate lots of data with the requirement to archive a significant volume. But it goes fast in that domain.

The software is Object Archive, a data management layer developed by Fujifilm, that connects data sources to secondary storage targets instantiated with tape libraries, remote sites and cloud instances via the S3 API. The service is exposed via multiple access methods - NFS, SMB and S3 - and could be controlled by any archiving, potentially backup, software in front of the Kangaroo device itself. This flexibility in terms of access methods both for ingest and offline writes offer a wide variety to use cases. Also the team has insisted of the Open Tape Format based on POSIX TAR that helps to read tapes without the software and be independent when tape are transferred across sites but also in the future.

Wishing to penetrate the market faster and as the solution could be a good fit for smaller companies, Fujifilm plans to introduce a Kangaroo lite model with capacity starting at 100TB.