Is Tape Automation Right for Your Business?                                                                            January, 2006                                                                                                             An autoloader consolidates daily tape swapping into a weekly or biweekly routine, reducing the opportunity for human error by up to 80%.  Further improving data protection levels, the operator or a supervisor may cross reference the loaded tapes against the tape inventory to confirm that the correct tapes are loaded. “Our remote office backups often fail due to neglected or erroneous tape swapping.” The convenience of tape automation is especially helpful in remote offices where the clerical staff is often responsible for maintaining backups.  Because the autoloader can identify the tapes that have been loaded by their barcodes, central IT personnel can remotely verify that the correct tapes are inserted. “Our backups frequently exceed the tape’s capacity, causing the backup to fail, or requiring someone to swap out the tape hours after the backup started.” An autoloader holds one or more spare tapes that will be automatically loaded by your backup software if your backup exceeds the capacity of a tape.  No operator intervention is required. “We frequently need to restore data, requiring us to locate and load the proper backup tape(s), and then later remember to re-load that night’s tape.” An autoloader simplifies most data restoration as the last full backup and subsequent incremental backups remain in the carousel.  Your backup software will automatically select the correct tape(s) without interfering with the next scheduled backup.  In addition, you can restore a tape from a previous week by inserting it into a spare slot to avoid interfering with the next backup. “We have data, servers, desktop workstations, or laptops that are not being backed-up.” Tape automation products allow you to protect data on multiple systems.  Where previously your alternatives were to purchase a tape drive for every system, or to purchase an expensive large capacity drive that can backup everything to a single tape, tape automation offers a much less costly alternative.  Backups can now reliably span several tapes when necessary, protecting more data on more systems. “We have had critical backups fail due to tape media errors.” When your backup software detects excessive tape errors, it will automatically load a spare tape and restart the backup without operator intervention.  Autoloaders further reduce tape errors by reducing the amount of wear and contamination due to handling. p1   p2   p3   p4   p5