The issue isn’t how fast your tape drives are, but how fast you can get to the data when you need it. Tape has always provided the most inexpensive, yet accessible, storage available for batch backups, disaster recovery, and long-term archives, but it has had its limitations (e.g., issues with mechanical components wearing down over ...

I have been spending a lot of time with TSM accounts lately, so I thought I would take the opportunity to discuss some of the gotchas and lessons learned from these environments, as they moved from a tape-centric backup environment to a disk based backup environment using EMC Data Domain technology.   The first and ...

Mainframe tape is a funny thing. Or at least it can look funny to a person that doesn’t work with mainframes. Funny because mainframe tape does a bunch of things. In the open systems world, life is simple by comparison. Tape does (or did!) basically one thing: backup. Yes, you could argue that it was ...