GO TAPE-LESS

The Pitfalls of Tape-Based Solutions

Hardware

While evolving to newer technologies, companies are often faced with having to manage older libraries to restore data critical information.  Over time many organizations have acquired and still leverage varying tape libraries and capacity drives including DLT, LTO1 and LTO2. This can be a nightmare for the technology teams when asked to restore information stored in varying formats. Additional tape hardware solutions are limited as follows:

• Hardware error reporting is often inadequate.
• Tapes are primarily an archiving solution – they don’t keep backup information online
• Tape capacity is often largely wasted.

Most software is sold by the server or CPU.  This results in large software charges related charges including annual maintenance fees.  Traditional tape based software solutions are limited as follows:

• Manual labeling of tapes is time consuming and prone to human error.
• Restore process is time consuming. If the file(s) that needs to be restored is not on the set of tapes that is in the tape slots, the support personnel must go to the vault, get the correct set of tapes, unload the current set of tapes, put the tape set that they will be restoring from into the tape drive, inventory the tapes, then do the restore.
• After the restore is complete, the support team unloads the tape set that was used and put them back into the vault, place the current tape set back into the tape slots and inventory the tapes to let the backup software know which tapes are in the slots.   Companies often face a restore time of 30 minutes to 2 hours for just a single file restore.
• Retrieval of backups from offsite storage facilities is time consuming.
• If a backup job fails, the job must be started over from the beginning. The backup will not pick up at a point where it failed.
• Software error reporting is inadequate. If a single file cannot be backed up because it is open, a failed job status occurs.
• There is no good way of managing the remote locations without staff at each site.   Plus, each site may have their own brand specific tape drive or CD for local backups on their servers. Tape based systems often don’t have centralized management consoles to track all locations.
• Tape software does not replicate the backups

 General

With increasing amounts of information being stored on computers, companies need to see a significant reduction in their backup window.  Tape drives typically backup between 60 GB/hour and 100 GB/hour.  For large application and database servers, this will result in huge backup windows, often requiring frequent off-hours human intervention.

Learn how SourceCopy can help your organization go tape-less and improve its overall backup and recovery strategy.

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