How the Right Tape Backup Software Makes Backups More Efficient and Cost-Effective

Linear tape-open (LTO) open-format tape technology may as well be ancient history in an industry where innovations arrive at a breathtaking pace. Founded in 1997, the high-capacity, single-reel implementation of LTO technology—known as the LTO Ultrium format—ensured cross-compatibility in tape storage products. Skip ahead more than two decades to 2018 when IEEE Spectrum published an article titled, “Why the future of data storage is (still) magnetic tape.”

The folks at IEEE got it right. Ultrium LTO recently reported that LTO tape capacity shipments reached a new record in 2021, with 148 Exabytes (EB) of total tape capacity (compressed) shipped—a 40 percent growth rate. Tape backups clearly have a place even in today’s cutting-edge IT infrastructures. But choosing the right tape backup software is crucial to getting the highest return on your tape storage investment while ensuring reliable data protection at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions.

Tape Backup Software Drives Efficiency and Savings

Over half of today’s data centers use today’s high-capacity LTO tape cartridges because they offer exceptional durability, with most vendors providing cartridge warranties of up to 30 years of archival life. It’s a storage medium that has, for the most part, been commoditized.

Even though tape backup can be affordable and reliable, as your organization generates more and more data, your costs for tape can concurrently rise, making it a potentially expensive backup target. That’s where the tape backup software you choose makes all the difference. Arcserve Backup Software gives you more extended retention periods, reduces storage requirements, and integrates powerful deduplication into your existing backup environment.

The software lets you store critical data on nearly any tape device—from a single tape drive to massive tape libraries—and manage your data in more locations. It also reduces the time you spend managing your backups in both simple and complex environments. As a core foundation of Arcserve’s data protection portfolio, Arcserve Backup Software features a modular architecture that lets you add more data protections without buying a new product or solution.

Proven Data Protection With Sophisticated Features and Functionality

Arcserve Backup Software includes centralized management and storage resource manager reporting to monitor the status of all backup activities, find the nodes that are taking the longest to perform jobs, locate backed-up data, and track volumes and disks.

The software lets you integrate sophisticated functionality into your hyperconverged infrastructure, including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer platforms. And it simplifies system management by giving you a view of your entire environment so you can mitigate data losses on virtualized servers.

Smarter, Faster Data Backups and Restores

Arcserve Backup Software makes backups happen faster and more efficiently with UNIX and Linux data movers for SAN-based backups. And the software includes smart restore capabilities that let you redirect restore jobs to other media containing the same data—without needing manual intervention. And you can quickly restore individual application objects from Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SharePoint.

The software meets application-specific requirements with backup to disk, backup to tape, disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T), disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C), virtual tape library (VTL), hardware snapshot support, multiplexing, and multi-streaming.

Once installed, you can create, manage, and monitor backups from one central location, with backups submitted on the primary server and run locally on the primary server or remotely on any associated member servers. You can even perform job operations like backup, restore, merge, scan, migrate, copy, and compare for all servers from the primary server and monitor job status from the central job queue.

To learn more about Arcserve Backup Software and how you can use tape storage for more cost-effective and efficient backups, find an Arcserve technology partner. For more product information, contact us.