Long-term access to old backup tapes to comply with legislation and regulations
The Situation
The end customer had to access the data on a large number of 3592 and 3592/JA tapes for a period of five years to comply with data retention and governance regulations. The backup tapes were created with Tivoli Storage Manager, but the end customer did not want to incur the expense of maintaining the legacy environment over a five-year period in case of infrequent restore requests of data from backup tapes.
The Solution
In collaboration with the IT service provider, Ontrack came up with a cost-effective and efficient solution to continue providing direct access to the end customer's backup tapes during the retention period. The first step was to perform a Proof of Concept (PoC) in which the end customer sent 5 tapes to Ontrack. The purpose of the PoC was to ensure full support was requested for the customer's tape and backup software combination as well as to determine project scope and timelines. After the PoC, Ontrack unpacked the Tivoli Storage Manager catalog into a standard database format. This enabled the IT service provider to identify the location of folders or specific files and send the relevant tapes to Ontrack for recovery when needed. The tape recovery data could then be delivered to the end customer on an encrypted hard drive or via secure FTP for low-volume or urgent recovery requests. Data recovery and maintenance of the required infrastructure are covered by a multi-year tape service agreement that allows for a predetermined number of tape restorations, with incremental restores available on request.