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David Tyler: Historically most of us would see Fujifilm as a storage media manufacturer: tell us how you came to make the move into offering more of a service/solution approach to your client base?
Roger Moore: It's certainly true: Fujifilm has been manufacturing magnetic media since the 1950s, and perhaps the most significant product breakthrough was in 1994 with the introduction of ATOMM, the technology that paved the way for the first 40GB DLTtape systems, and from there to LTO tape and Nanocubic technology, of course. Over all of this time we've accumulated an unrivalled wealth of knowledge about storage and backup, and what is required for effective archival.

Increasingly these days, clients are recognising that although tape technologies continue to develop and to offer lower cost storage, it doesn't overcome the specific issue of legacy archive, and of security and compliance. For example, a user may be storing away their LTO tapes in a third-party storage facility - at some point they really need to check those tapes, which in itself can be a hassle, and expensive at that. Moreover they will run into problems at some point: we've now launched LTO6, which will read and write LTO5 tapes. However with LTO4 tapes, it is limited to read-only. So for anyone wanting to migrate to LTO6, if they have an existing population of LTO3 tapes they can't be read. Some of our clients have tens of thousands of tapes - in the case of some financial institutions even hundreds of thousands - archived away. Their problem is that they then have to retain and maintain old legacy hardware and software - and even then they will probably still have to regularly convert to new software versions. This can make it difficult for any business to predict the total cost of archiving and data storage for its data centres. Our technical people have been looking at this over a long time, and we came up with this concept of a 'future proofed archive'.

DT: What exactly is the nature of this product?
RM: The offering itself is called d:ternity, and was launched in Germany two years ago. We have a number of local clients there who are already using it successfully. It reduces their costs, and allows the clients to draw back the data they want when they want it, in whatever format they want. Compare this to the costs of running your own archive/backup facility: premises costs, hardware, software, personnel. On top of that the traditional in-house approach has no solution to the problem of what we call 'cross-generation compatibility'; i.e. what happens when you move to a new generation only to find that your two- or three-generation old tapes can no longer be read - unless you retain expensive legacy drives in an library that, in all likelihood, will very rarely get used.

This is part of the problem with archives in our view: people are increasingly being persuaded to put archive onto hard disk, never mind tape, when they might never need to access that data again. It is estimated that only between 5% and 10% is ever recalled. With our approach clients can avoid the whole cross-generation compatibility issue entirely, of course.

DT: Can you give us some more detail on exactly what d:ternity is and how it works?
RM: It's a new approach for us in the sense that it is a service solution offering, but at the same time it fits with our long term objectives of supplying media and of course promoting tape storage. Essentially the concept is quite simple: we will backup our customers' archive data for them, and store it in a format-neutral system, within our secure centre in Germany. The client can recall archived data any way they want: via the web, on a hard drive, on an LTO tape, to suit their needs. They don't need to be concerned about that data at all: we guarantee that data will be available, which frankly I don't believe anyone else is able to do. It really is a unique proposition.

It's important to understand that we're not competing here with Cloud storage: this is a true 'deep archive'. It's not about offering to supply data back in the space of a few minutes via online access. We could do that, but it's not what we're about - we can offer a next-day or 48-hour service for recall of data. We can offer two core options, depending on a business' requirements.

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