Is Tape Automation Right for Your Business?                                                                            January, 2006                                                                                                               Conclusion Automating the backup and retrieval processes increases backup reliability and enhances operational efficiency.  As such, autoloaders ensure optimal data protection with the added benefit of cost efficiency and investment protection.   The following checklist will help you determine if tape automation is right for your organization.  A yes answer to one or more questions indicates that an autoloader may improve your data protection scheme. Symptom Yes/No We have multiple servers that must be backed up on a regular basis We currently operate and maintain multiple tape drives for backups Our backups exceed the capacity of a single tape Our data volumes are growing rapidly Our organization must comply with regulations dictating backup or data retention standards We have discovered that backups were unsuccessful after the fact Our tape swapping procedures are difficult to maintain or unreliable Having to swap tapes daily is inconvenient and disruptive to the work day We experience backup failure due to media failures We frequently need to restore data from backups We require rapid access to recent backups for ad-hoc file or folder recovery We have remote offices where personnel without IT experience are responsible for maintaining backups We need to be able to monitor the status of tape insertions/rotations remotely We lack absolute confidence in our ability to recover data p1   p2   p3   p4   p5