Is Tape Automation RightNarain for Your Business?                                                                                                                 Janbuary, 2006                                                                                                                                                  An Exabyte White Paper Is Tape Automation Right for Your Business? Introduction Today’s inexpensive tape automation solutions enable small and medium sized businesses to easily reduce their risk of data loss, while enjoying numerous other benefits including labor savings and convenience.  This paper will help you determine if tape automation is appropriate for your organization considering your financial and risk management objectives.  In addition, common backup challenges that you may be experiencing are explored, describing how those challenges are resolved with tape automation.  Further, techniques are outlined for cost-justifying the purchase of a tape autoloader with labor and backup consolidation savings, and estimating the return on investment through improved data protection. A Brief Introduction to Backup Automation A tape autoloader is a compact storage device that contains a tape drive, multiple tape cartridge slots, and a robotic mechanism that moves tapes between the slots and the tape drive.  Backup software controls the autoloader, which instructs the autoloader to insert the correct tape before beginning a backup or restore.  Each tape has a unique barcode sticker that the backup software uses to identify and confirm that the correct tape is in the drive. With multiple cartridge slots, a single tape loading operation, occurring weekly or even bi-weekly, addresses as many as ten backups.  Filling the autoloader with a batch of tapes less often, extending tape swapping intervals, is intrinsically more reliable than depending on daily tape swapping. Less frequent operator intervention reduces the impact of employee absence, forgetfulness, confusion and turnover on the backup process. Does Tape Automation take Risk out of the Backup Process? Tape automation addresses specific, easily identified challenges to maintaining reliable backups: “Our daily swapping of backup tapes is occasionally neglected, or the wrong tape is inserted, causing that night’s backup to fail.” Exabyte Corporation 1685 38th Street Boulder, CO 80301 www.exabyte.com An autoloader requires only one weekly or biweekly swapping session. A full week’s backup tape swapping presents numerous opportunities for error that will cause the next backup to fail. p1   p2   p3   p4   p5