The following challenges are typical for current backup environments:

• Problems meeting your backup window
• Inability to restore data fast enough
• Excess staff time spent on labor-intensive and repetitive media management tasks (i.e. mounting tapes, fixing tape drive failures, recalling tapes from storage for restoration)
• Budgetary constraints or space limitations in the data center
• Need a secure off-site vaulting solution
• New tape technologies (LTO-3) will back-hitch if the backup stream drops below expected bandwidth.

The iTapeStor solution is designed to address these major issues. ITapeStor is based on the concept of a Virtual Tape-Library (VTL).

 
Case-in-Point: Tape Streaming –

New generation LTO-3 tape drives will back-hitch if the backup stream drops below 40MB/sec.  When this happens, the tape drive enters a “shoe-shining” mode and writes data very slowly. Most backup servers can’t drive LTO3 drives anywhere near their maximum data rates and the tape drives actually run slower when the server can’t stream data at the required speeds.

With iTapeStor, it can automatically match the speed of any backup stream and support large numbers of concurrent streams. ITapeStor performs faster than most of the current tape technologies and can also be used as temporary cache so that the physical tape creation or copy processing can be made to occur outside the backup window.