Tape Storage Systems

IBM invented the concept of magnetic tape computer storage back in 1952 and continues to lead the industry in tape innovation. Contrary to what the press would have us believe tape is not dead and continues to be the most cost-effective, flexible and scalable medium for high capacity storage back up. Tape on average costs up to 10 times less disk. Tape is removable, scalable, portable, fast and most importantly reliable.

Northdoor and Tape

Northdoor realise that the amount of data that organisations need to store and access has seen exponential growth over the last few years. Businesses now rely on data for every aspect of their operations and with greater proportion of revenue coming from Web based services the effective storage and data is fast becoming the number one issue for CIO’s and company directors. Northdoor have almost 20 years experience of designing and implementing IBM Storage based solutions, we realise that the requirement of each and every customer differs and use these years of experience to come up with the most effective solution carefully considering key factors such as the amount of data to be stored and the rate at which that data is growing, the availability of staff resources and the time that can be allocated for administration. We work with our customer to design reliable, robust back up and recovery services based around IBM tape that grow with the organisation. Working with Vapormatic Northdoor put together a solution to integrate their Microsoft Windows based intranet applications with its core OS/400 business systems. This included the introduction of an Ultrium tape drive for backup, which saw back up times cut from four hours to just 40 minutes with plenty of spare tape capacity for future growth. This solution is currently being rolled out to Vapormatic subsidiaries in EU countries, then the rest of the world, meaning the backup window will become very small, so this increase in performance can provide Vapormatic with a significant advantage.