Australian technology company Tape Ark, which aims to “liberate the world’s largest collection of data,” has chosen Dallas for its U.S. headquarters after a rigorous selection process.
Locally, Tape Ark will set up its new U.S. mass data migration center and proprietary mass tape-to-cloud platform. Dallas was evaluated by the team—along with Atlanta, Denver, and Houston—but ultimately won because of its large-scale data migration projects already underway.
Tape Ark considers setting up shop here as giving it an “unfair advantage” against competitors.
“That advantage is that Dallas is a great city, but more importantly, high-speed direct connections to the major cloud providers in Dallas are exceptional,” Kyle Evans, Tape Ark’s chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “This speed means we can migrate our customer’s data faster and more reliably to their cloud storage.”
Per CBRE data from earlier this year, Dallas-Fort Worth had the third largest data center leasing activity in North America in 2020, behind Northern Virginia and Toronto. The demand comes from the number of cloud service providers and large tech companies who consider the region their home base—and those that continue migrating here.
Dallas-Fort Worth had 33.7 megawatts (MW) of net absorption last year, according to CBRE. That’s up 30.6 percent from the year prior, mainly due to an uptick in enterprise leasing activity.
Data centers are one of the fastest growing real estate sectors pre-pandemic, CBRE says. As businesses reconfigure their digital infrastructure to improve remote work capabilities, the real estate company only sees it continuing to climb. Plus, as demand for evolving technologies like 5G, edge computing, and IoT surges, the data center market will keep surging.
Tape Ark’s platform is designed to migrate multi-petabyte datasets into the cloud. According to the company, it’s an SO 27001, PCI-DSS, HITRUST, FISMA, ITAR, SOC-1, SOC-2, and SOC-3 certified facility.
Tape Ark aims to make data securely and efficiently available to the application of data analytics tools, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies. Its method is to offer a safe and secure way to migrate high-volume corporate data from archive tape media to the cloud.
That allows clients to “transform forgotten and decaying data, sitting in storage cost centers, into a valuable business asset and revenue stream.”
Once operational, Tape Ark Dallas will handle up to half an exabyte of tape-to-cloud data migration per annum. From there, over the next 24 months, the team said it plans to expand connections.
The local location will give Tape Ark ‘direct on-ramps’ to some of its cloud partners—Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Backblaze, and Wasabi—that are in close proximity.
“This is the first of two new operations planned globally for Tape Ark as we grow our business in the USA, Europe and Asia Pacific regions,” Guy Holmes, Tape Ark’s president and CEO, said. “Our major customers in media and entertainment, energy, public sector, financial services, healthcare and resources are enjoying the benefits of rapidly migrating their highly valuable datasets and realizing new value once in the cloud.”
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