Case Study
An Exercise in Data Retention
Cost Savings on Retention of Unused Tapes
Project Completed on Time
In-House Solution
Customer
A leading diversified communications and media company
Problem
The customer was engaged in a tape retention project to establish data retention requirements for all their various data tape types and reduce their overall number of tapes. The customer is one of the largest communications companies in Canada, which already had a substantial amount of data stored on tape, and had also made several acquisitions of smaller competitors over the years. The result had over 200,000 physical tapes with many different tape formats (3480, 3490, DLT, LTO, 4mm, 8mm, 9840, 9940) created by disparate systems (MVS, OS400, UNIX, DEC, Windows). Some of the storage tapes were unmatched and not identified in the various management catalogs.
An integral part of the project required that the thousands of unmatched tapes be looked at to see if the data contained on the tape had expired and if the tape format was no longer in use. The tape would either be destroyed or put back into the tape pool for continued use
Solution
Keltech provided a standalone hardware/software solution deployed in the customer’s data center. The hardware included all the tape drives required to read the various media types. Our Keltechnicians were onsite for a total of 20 working days to manage the standalone drives and to load and unload the automated tape library brought in by our team for the project. Meaning, no tapes had to leave the customer’s premises, and it did not tie up any of their resources which was a major concern for the customer.
We were able to map the contents of the unmatched tapes and provide the customer with a report that included information such as the internal label/volser, number of volumes, files associated with each volume, dataset/job name, and creation date.
