Archiving in today's business climate
Archiving has emerged in recent years to become a business and information technology (IT) imperative. Where a simple backup to tape cartridge may have sufficed for making a copy of files in the past to satisfy regulatory retention, preservation and recovery requirements, today's organization faces far more complex needs.
While still viable as an offline option for long term storage, tape solutions no longer meet the demand for your company's need for a high performance and extremely reliable online data archive.
Archiving Challenges
- Tape is not meeting enterprise requirements
Archiving is not just about keeping data for long periods of time. The explosion in data growth coupled with the need to keep more data online, has forced companies to re-evaluate their data archiving requirements, and it has become apparent that storing data on unreliable tape-based solutions does not meet the need of today’s enterprise requirements. For data stored on tape media - it is a common customer problem to find irretrievable data on corrupted tape cartridges, and for tapes to become lost or damaged in transit to offsite vaulting.
- Corporate SLA's and regulatory compliance
With constantly changing requirements for offsite data protection and retention periods, customers have attempted to meet this challenge by attempting to store everything to tape. This strategy quickly becomes unmanageable and cost prohibitive. Customers that take this band-aid data protection approach typically only look at tape from a raw $-per-GB acquisition cost perspective. When you build in the cost for maintenance, management and media refresh cycles you get a real perspective on what tape-based solutions are costing you.
- Tape management is time consuming and cost prohibitive
Tape media management duties include cartridge tracking, labeling, storage, and movement. These labor intensive operations are not only cost prohibitive, but put your business at risk as well. Have you ever googled "lost tapes?"