Iron Mountain Unveils New Backup Tape Offerings
March 13, 2012 Alex Woodie
Iron Mountain last week unveiled three new offerings aimed at helping organizations manage their backup tapes and related processes. The new offerings are designed to eliminate some of the hurdles that legacy tape formats present to organizations and make it easier to access data on the tape. Iron Mountain is a well-known, $3 billion company that collects and stores important documents for customers in all industries. It has also served as a secure repository for organizations’ backup tapes. With its recent announcement, Iron Mountain will not only store tapes for customers, but it will help them more effectively manage the actual data stored on the tapes. The new tape services are spread across three offerings. With Iron Mountain Tape Identification, the vendor will analyze a customer’s tape and index the contents. This service is available on a project-by-project basis. Iron Mountain Data Restoration will be a useful service for organizations that need to restore data on a tape, but no longer have hardware or software required to read the tape. The Data Restoration service is available on demand or through a long-term subscription. The Iron Mountain Media Migration offering takes Data Restoration a step further, and presents the customer’s data on their choice of format, whether it’s a newer tape format, DVD, or other storage media. This service is available on a subscription basis. The new tape services from Iron Mountain will help customers deal with exponential growth of data, says the company’s senior vice president and general manager of data backup and recovery, Blaine Rigler. “Most of this data is archival, most likely never to be needed again, yet organizations keep it for compliance reasons and in the event of disaster or litigation,” Rigler says in a press release. “In these scenarios, tape can be a viable solution, but it still requires additional functionality to discover what’s on these tapes, retrieve the information and, if necessary, migrate the data to a compliant media format.”
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