Legacy data restore service: backup and archive reduced by 85%
The Situation
The end customer wanted to reduce the cost of preserving and restoring its old archived data. The cost of maintaining the current system would be approximately £3.5 million over seven years. The customer asked their new backup & archiving supplier to find a way to reduce these costs while still retaining the ability to restore and extract data from the old tapes as they were not compatible with the new supplier's systems and its own software. The archive storage provider contacted Ontrack with their dilemma; so they could proceed with the sale of the modern archive system with a solution for preserving the accessibility of the legacy archive tapes. After briefing the situation, Ontrack's tape engineers devised a cost-effective plan to catalog 3,600 9940B tapes created by the legacy system. The archive data would then remain on the old tapes so that in the event the end customer consulted their new catalog for the exact tapes containing the files they need, Ontrack would perform the ad-hoc restore. The request was to catalog 3,600 tapes and provide restore capabilities to maintain access to older archive data.
The Solution
Ontrack worked with the client to conduct a pilot project to demonstrate that the concept was technically feasible and cost-effective while meeting stringent legal and corporate data security and protection requirements. Following the success of the pilot project, the complete catalog of the tape archive was delivered within nine weeks, enabling the legacy system to be phased out before the software refresh deadline.
The Resolution
Ultimately, the developed solution enabled the end customer to retire their legacy system and save more than £3 million in data retention and archiving costs. More about Ontrack backup tape services https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/tape-services