Tape backup systems gained wide popularity in
the 1980's when IT was typically a productivity tool
and not core to businesses. At the time 'critical' information was typically
confined to accounts information that was also retained on paper. A 30%
failure rate was not a problem. Today, computing systems are core to how
businesses work; a 30% failure rate in a disaster typically means that a
business won't recover, this isn't acceptable.
Tapes and tape backup windows are struggling and failing to cope with the massive growth in data and email storage requirements of modern businesses - typically 75% per annum. In short, tape backups aren't working.
To resolve the above problem, most businesses now use multiple tapes in an autoloader device. Whilst this may enable enough tape space to accommodate the volume of information they have to backup, it creates more problems and substantially increases the number of tapes, the amount of time and the cost involved in implementing backup schedules.
Individual files are often business critical and highly time sensitive. In a typical scenario where an individual inadvertently destroys an important document or email, recovery using the multiple tapes in a backup set can take hours and hours. With our offsite solution it can be achieved in minutes.
Undertaking a full recovery from tape is an involved process. An operating system, compatible tape drive hardware and software usually has to be installed before this can take place. Our solution typically only requires a basic operating system (e.g. DOS) - enough to support RAID systems before a full restore can be made. What's more as the system is intelligent, backups can be restored to differing hardware, with the restore process prompting for any changed drivers it requires.
Tape poses a significant problem in recovering older information because tape hardware and software change with monotonous regularity. Often newer drives and older tapes are physically incompatible. In an era where regulators and the law require that data is kept for up to 12 years, this is unacceptable. Our system is hardware and software agnostic - data can be recovered onto virtually any machine
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The average failure rate for recovery from tapes is |
30% |