Case Study: Adding Disk To Backup

The old Northeast Delta Dental system provided great protection—data was backed up and tapes were taken off-site every day as best practices would dictate—but the system had become fragmented and complex. "We never had time or resources to duplicate tapes, so when we had to restore a file—something we do several times a week—it was extremely slow," explains Northeast Delta Dental's Manager of Networking and Technical Support, Dan Kaplan. "We had to get tapes returned from the off-site facility and re-load them to restore anything. It took hours, with significant manual intervention. There is also an expensive per-trip cost to recall tapes from the off-site facility."

Northeast Delta Dental's IT department liked the idea of getting disk into their backup, but they absolutely demanded the security of off-site tape storage and wanted to decrease management time. They looked at using backup software and conventional ATA disk arrays as a backup target but rejected it. Kaplan said, "We realized it was going to be hard to share our storage resources and creating tapes was going to become even more difficult. We saw too many steps, too much scripting, too many points of failure, and too much extra management."

Instead, the IT department selected Quantum's Pathlight VX disk-to-tape backup solution, which they deployed with a Quantum Scalar 24 automated tape library. Pathlight VX is a disk backup solution that makes ATA disk arrays look like a tape library, so existing backup software can write easily to it. It also features an integrated path for creating physical tapes that can be exported for long-term storage. "Pathlight VX gives us disk backup advantages while keeping our tape-based security practices, and it has worked wonderfully", Kaplan added. "We still use tape, but now the tapes are created in the background and don't use our backup servers and SAN—they can even be created outside the normal backup window."