Is Tape Automation Right for Your Business?                                                                            January, 2006                                                                                                               Does a Tape Autoloader Pay for Itself? Ultimately, reducing the business risk of data loss is a primary justification for tape automation.  However, paying for itself in labor savings and backup consolidation is also a significant tape automation benefit. The daily manual exchange of backup tapes imposes a minimum fifteen-minute interruption of an employee’s focus, amounting to 65 hours of lost productivity per year.  Reducing this activity to only fifteen minutes per week frees 52 hours of employee time for other tasks.  Assuming a total employee annual compensation cost of $60,000, deploying tape automation realizes $1,500 in annual increased productivity.  As such, the cost of adding automation to a tape backup solution pays for itself in less than one year.  These calculations do not include the labor savings an autoloader achieves by accelerating restores, and eliminating the need for employee after-hours presence to merely insert a second tape, or to replace a failed tape. Those minutes and hours quickly could add on thousands in saved man-hour costs. Protecting several servers, desktop workstations or laptops further cost justifies tape automation.  Consolidating backups is more reliable, easier to manage, and less expensive than purchasing individual tape drives for each system. Although difficult to quantify, reducing business risk by deploying an autoloader delivers the greatest return on investment.   Justifying the cost of an overall backup scheme must include the cost to re-key lost data, or the implications of permanent data loss, factored by the statistical likelihood of such an event.  As such, you can weigh the cost of a backup solution compared to its contribution to reducing risk. In a recent survey¹ over 51.6% of respondents indicated that their tape failures were sometimes, often or always caused by human error. Tape automation reduces the opportunity for human error by up to 80%, and reduces the likelihood of tape failures by allowing the backup software to automatically and immediately substitute a spare tape when media errors are detected or more capacity is needed.  Considering that tape automation thus reduces the risk of backup failure by up to 50%, an autoloader could double the potential return on investment of any backup scheme.                                                  1 Storage Magazine, “Tale of the tape”, February, 2005 p1   p2   p3   p4   p5