Tape Media Automation

Lights out backup operations

As your data volumes continue to grow you’ll inevitably reach the point where you need more backup storage capacity than single tape drives provide. This is when tape media automation becomes a necessity and you need to look at a tape library.

Tape Automation

Tape media automation complements backup centralisation very well and the two are often implemented together.

Advantages

  • Improved backup reliability - Short term staff illness or absence will not disrupt normal, automated, backup operations
  • Improved service leels - Files can be recovered from backup much more quickly when the relevant tape is stored in the library
  • Labour cost savings - Automated tape libraries require much less manual intervention than backup solutions based upon standalone drives. This often frees up a significant amount of time that your IT staff can instead spend on on more strategic or value-added activities, yielding significant cost savings for your business.

Disadvantages

  • Purchase cost - Any type of hardware consolidation, including tape consolidation such as this, requires a conscious change of approach and up-front capital expenditure in order to reap the ongoing TCO savings.

While your business will only go through this type of centralisation exercise once, we do it all the time. Ask Data Engines | ENSTOR to help you develop policies, procedures & service level targets, choose hardware, evaluate software and put it all together.

If your backup data volumes grow past the point where a single backup server can meet your target service levels, you may want to consider tape library sharing for increased scalability.

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