Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich Selects Crossroads

Crossroads Systems, Inc. announced that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) chose Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance (RVA) 3.0 to proactively manage and monitor the integrity, performance and utilization of its tape libraries, drives, and media. The distinguished institution relies on Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance to ensure the long-term availability of more than 2.2 petabytes of data.

ETH Zurics selection of Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance follows a fast-growing number of major organizations worldwide turning to Crossroads RVA to guarantee the integrity of the data they backup. A science and technology university of the Swiss Confederation, ETH Zurich is the study, research and work place of 18,000 people from 80 nations. Approximately 350 professors in 16 departments teach engineering sciences and architecture, system-oriented sciences, mathematics and natural sciences areas resulting in research that requires daily, ongoing preservation and accessibility of vital data on a massive scale.

The Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance is a simple plug-and-play appliance that monitors and reports on the performance, utilization and health of tape libraries, drives and media. Customers such as ETH Zurich have chosen Crossroads RVA, as it proactively alerts and provides its storage administrators with detailed information on potential backup failure conditions, such as tape media errors or poorly performing tape drives. Establishing visibility for potential failure information allows organizations to maximize their existing tape assets for improved backup completion rates, and to take preventive measures to avoid storing data on defective media resulting in substantial IT savings and proven ROI.

"We were primarily interested in checking our tape media and drives, logging errors and obtaining information about the utilization level of our backup infrastructure. And it was important to us to obtain the relevant information before an error paralyzed our entire backup system," said Dr. Tilo Steiger, Head of the Storage Service Group within the System Services Department of ETH Zurics IT Services. "By gaining a precise insight into our tapes and drives, we are able to make our planning better, more reliable and longer-term for example, which tapes have to be replaced and which can still go on being used."

"Through Crossroads RVA, organizations such as ETH Zurich obtain clear-cut insight into the status of their tapes and drives contributing to faster, more reliable backup," said Rob Sims, President and CEO of Crossroads Systems. "With backup and recovery serving as a vital function of large IT teams, RVA eliminates guess work and creates a consistent process for verifying data accessibility creating greatly heightened peace of mind. We are pleased to see organizations such as ETH Zurich rely on Crossroads RVA to maximize the performance and utilization of backup and recovery."