Legacy Tape Access: Unlocking backup data in support of data center consolidation and litigation

By Deni Connor
Senior Analyst
Storage Strategies NOW
November 2010

Retaining legacy tapes in order to comply with corporate legal policy has become a real problem for IT administrators – they stack up in closets, storerooms and at off-site service provider locations. You can’t recycle them or destroy them because the lawyers say you can’t – you might need the information on them for litigation or because of regulatory compliance. But you have no idea what data is on them and how useful it is to your organization — they are just the results of hundreds of full and incremental disaster recovery backups you’ve done over the last so-many years. And, that’s a lot of tape – Storage Strategies NOW estimates that tape has 25 times the volume of disk because of the backup rotation methods – grandfather, father and son – used to back it up and protect it.

The problems associated with retaining tapes, and recovering them if necessary, is compounded when the impact of business mergers or acquisitions is considered. Once a merger takes place two (or more) data sets have to be managed, including inherited sets of tape, potentially created by different backup processes on different equipment. In the merger of your organization and ‘theirs,’ you’ll be tasked with consolidating the storage infrastructures and the data from both organizations. Streamlining access to backup data and consolidating the backup infrastructures will also be a challenge.

Nonetheless, the amount of information stored on tape is overwhelming companies and IT resources. Companies can easily have 10’s or 100’s of thousands of tapes sitting in offsite storage. Although it costs only a few dollars to store data on tape, new tapes must be purchased each year to support ongoing backup. Degraded tapes must be replaced with new media. Off-site service provider storage must be retained. And, legacy backup software and tape systems must be kept and the skill set maintained if you ever have to retrieve data off the tapes. Companies can easily spend hundreds of thousands or millions of annual IT dollars, depending on the volume of legacy tapes, on this effort.

In the event that your organization has to retrieve data from tape for litigation, data consolidation through merger or acquisition or migration to a new backup platform, the burden falls on you, the IT administrator.

Traditionally, you’ve had to recover data from tape using often outmoded or unfamiliar backup software and archaic tape subsystems. That is a time-consuming process as you well know that is complicated by the fact that little of the data recovered will ever be needed for eDiscovery. You can expect to spend hundreds of
hours and thousands of dollars to extract the data you need from tape. Storage Strategies NOW estimates that it costs an IT department around $2,000 to process and restore a single backup tape – and that expense adds up with each backup tape you need to process.

The amount of time to restore a tape depends on a number of factors including the tape technology employed, the interface used (SCSI or Fibre Channel), whether data is compressed and the block size of the data being backed up, the number of files that need to be recovered and the consistency and reliability of the media.

Consider these typical restore times for some legacy drives.

Now, add the manpower cost assigned to performing the tape restore, setting up and configuring legacy backup solutions and tape drives. And then multiply that by the hundreds of tapes you have to restore, then search for and identify relevant information that must be saved. The costs quickly add up and the task becomes insurmountable.

How’s the best way to do it?

Remediate, not restore
Traditionally, tape restoration happened in a manual fashion – the IT administrator will have to restore all the data from tape using the correct version of the original backup software. Once restored to disk, data was analyzed to determine what data was relevant to the discovery process. The data no longer required by legal for litigation or compliance purposes was then purged and tapes shredded. Altogether this was a complex and time-consuming process.

There is a way to recover the data on legacy tape and consolidate your data resources. With tape remediation – powered by automated, direct tape indexing offered by companies such as Index Engines – tapes can be scanned and once that is done, the index can be searched for relevant information, data extracted and moved to an archive or litigation hold repository. The key difference is that restoration, or the original backup
software environment is not required. Access to tape data is simplified allowing for the extraction of specific files and email based on any query versus restoration of the entire content of tape.

Data Center Consolidation
Beyond litigation, IT managers are often faced with projects that are impeded by legacy backup tapes. Conversion to a new backup software vendor is often a challenge due to the historical tape content. Moving, and retiring the old backup environment, would mean access to legacy tapes is no longer possible. Using the
direct indexing and extraction capabilities from Index Engines bypasses the need for the legacy backup environment and facilitates the conversion to the new backup software vendor.

This same scenario applies to organizations that inherit non-production backup tapes through a merger or acquisition, or have rogue departments using non-standard backup solutions. Consolidation of these backup environments is a tremendous cost savings in that the non-production backup software can be retired and removed from maintenance.

The Index Engines appliance supports all tape drives that have an LVD SCSI, Fibre Channel or SAS interface and backup applications from Symantec, EMC Legato, IBM Tivoli, CA Technologies and CommVault, among others.

SSG-NOW Assessment
The Index Engines approach to tape recovery makes a lot of sense for IT managers and administrators – in fact, for any organization’s personnel including legal counsel. Remediating tape, not restoring it with traditional backup software and legacy tape drives saves money and time for the administrator, who can now be tasked with more strategic projects. For legal discovery or data consolidation, the Index Engines appliance is a real time-saver.

Note: The information and recommendations made by Storage Strategies NOW are based upon public information and sources and may also include personal opinions both of Storage Strategies NOW and others, all of which we believe to be accurate and reliable. As market conditions change however, and not within our control, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. Storage Strategies NOW, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon, the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent errors which may appear in this document.