Tape media is used as part of organizations’ disaster recovery and archive initiatives; however, tape backups and recoveries fail at all too regular rates, placing crucial corporate data at risk. Tape failures can be the result of a complex mix of issues relating to the tape drives, media, network and applications. Crossroads’ ReadVerify Appliance (RVA) provides a non-intrusive method for monitoring, validating and reporting on the performance, utilization and health of the physical tape library environment.
RVA is a stand-alone appliance that proactively monitors tape backups and reports cartridge and drive statistics collected during backup operations. It provides insight into an organization’s media utilization and the health of its backup environments.
RVA’s automatic alerting and reporting functionality provides information on impending media and drive failures as well as overall utilization and performance of tape media and drives. Reports can be used for load balancing and to proactively address media and hardware failure exposures before they threaten the organization’s backup health.
Key Features & Benefits
Maximize Utilization and Performance of the Tape Library
With the information provided in RVA’s reports, an administrator can maximize and balance the utilization and performance of the library’s tape drives. This leads to: completing backup jobs on time, minimizing purchases of unnecessary drives, eliminating maintenance on unneeded equipment and preventing premature wear of over-used resources.
Extend the Life of Tape Media
Proactively assessing tape media validity over its effective life, RVA tracks the capability of the backup system to read media and analyzes results over time. Results are compared against a user-defined set of policies, and users are alerted to suspect media. RVA provides a vehicle to remove error-prone or defective media before a backup failure occurs.
Minimize Data Risk
By monitoring the health and integrity of the tape drives and media, RVA provides a proactive indication of data at risk. RVA tracks and correlates reported media errors on tapes and drives over their effective life, providing the means to determine whether the media or device is operating below manufacturers’ recommended standards. By swiftly identifying the degrading asset, corrective action can be taken to quickly minimize risk to data. Also, rapid problem identification reduces tape wastage.
Automated Reports and Real-Time Alerts
RVA reports on multiple tape and drive parameters, including hard and soft read and write errors, drive and library firmware version, drive performance, drive occupancy and utilization. RVA real-time alerts are individually enabled and configured to trigger at user-defined thresholds. Reports and alerts can be emailed to multiple addresses. Through an intuitive Web-based console, RVA displays graphs and statistics on the library, tape drives and media, exposing tape subsystem metrics for quick analysis. Also, RVA provides a mechanism for third-party applications to access its database for expanded reporting capability.
Optional ArchiveVerifyTM Ensures All Tape Media is Readable
ArchiveVerify (AV) is an optional feature for RVA that enables users to ensure what has been written to tape media can be read for recovery or compliance audits, even over long periods of time. AV offers an automated process based on administrator-applied policies for selected tape pools. Verification procedures are automatically initiated on the entire written length of tape media.
ReadVerify Appliance Architecture
The device is contained in a compact, 1U rack-mount appliance connected via Fibre Channel with an HTML management and reporting user interface. There are two RVA models to address customer requirements, the RV50f which supports up to 90 tape slots, and the RV300f, upgradable in increments to 10,000 tape slots.
Why RVA from CIBER?
RVA monitoring and management capabilities provide real-time information to IT and storage managers, allowing them instant insight into the health, utilization, and performance of their tape backups. No longer do they need to wait until the end of a backup, or when the backup is needed, to find out if it even worked. With RVA, they’ll immediately know that a backup is in the process of failing, and why.
With CIBER’s ability to fully architect and infrastructure solution, and to address the complete information life cycle, from creation to archiving to reuse, our clients’ know that the solution they select is the one that will not only fit their needs, but meet future challenges as well.
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