About Me
Brad Johns is currently the President of Brad Johns Consulting LLC. His firm provides analysis and consulting to help computer storage companies and end-users with their marketing and strategy needs.
Services
Providing experienced consulting and analysis to help computer storage companies and end-users with their marketing and strategy needs.
News & Publications
New! - IMPROVING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY WITH MODERN TAPE _ October 2025
The explosive growth of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping digital infrastructure demands, accelerating data center construction, and driving energy consumption to unprecedented levels. With daily GenAI users numbering over 100 million, hyperscale data centers are deploying high-performance Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and flash solid-state drive (SSD) storage at scale, resulting in data center power consumption that could rise to as much as 12% of total U.S. energy use by 2028 .
Amid this surge, inactive or infrequently accessed data—estimated to comprise 60% to 80% of enterprise storage—poses a significant challenge to sustainability and cost. Storing cold data on hard disk drives (HDDs) substantially increases power consumption, carbon emissions, and electronic waste at a time when corporate sustainability commitments are under mounting scrutiny from stakeholders and regulators.
Updated to include LTO 10, this report continues to demonstrate that modern tape storage offers IT leaders a practical and impactful path forward. Tape is purpose-built for inactive data: it consumes no energy when idle, generates far less embedded carbon, and requires fewer refresh cycles than HDDs. In modeled scenarios, shifting all inactive data to tape reduces energy consumption and CO₂ emissions by up to 95% compared with HDD-only solutions. Even active-archive strategies—where 60% of data is placed on tape and 40% remains on disk—achieve a 57% reduction in CO2 emissions and a 50% reduction in e-waste. The financial advantages are equally compelling. Using the Fujifilm TCO model, a 100-PB, 10-year storage scenario reveals that disk-only solutions incur costs exceeding $12 million. A hybrid active archive lowers TCO by 38%, while a full tape deployment cuts costs by 65%. The report may be accessed at this link
New! - ALL DATA IS INDISPENSABLE: The Staggering Immensity of an Active Archive - August 2025
As Generative AI (GenAI) drives unprecedented demand for high-speed data access, it’s easy to overlook that not all data needs to be accessed in real time. In fact, over 70% of enterprise data could be more efficiently managed as active archives—data that remains accessible but does not require the performance (or expense) of SSDs and HDDs. Yet in 2024, SSDs and HDDs managed 83.9% of all enterprise data, while cost-effective and power-efficient tape accounted for only 16.1% of shipped capacity. This imbalance results in excessive costs and unnecessary energy consumption, especially as the storage footprint grows to a multi-zettabyte scale.
In this report, co-authored with John Monroe, we explore the potential impact of this dramatic growth on end-user data storage spending for the period 2025-2050. Our analysis includes projections of shipments and customer spending for enterprise SSDs, HDDs, tape, and emerging storage technologies. The installed enterprise install base is projected to grow from 7.7 ZB in 2025 to 20.2 ZB in 2030 to 243 ZB in 2050, and customer spending is projected to grow from $68 billion in 2025 to $101 billion in 2030 to $145 billion in 2050.
We are anticipating innovative storage technologies specifically designed for low-cost, long-term data storage will come to market in the latter half of this decade, and that will meaningfully impact industry shipments and revenue. In addition, we project that the overall data growth rates will moderate after 2030 in light of financial constraints and the deployment of GenAI to reduce the quantity of stored data by eliminating redundancies and enforcing data retention policies.
The economic and ecological benefits are explicit, and financial constraints will drive organizations to adopt and utilize lower-cost, more sustainable storage solutions. Data center managers who proactively integrate active-archive technologies will not only optimize costs but also position their organizations to meet emerging compliance mandates and energy constraints. The full report can be accessed at this link.