Analytics Software for Oracle StorageTek Tape

Oracle Corp. announced StorageTek Tape Analytics, its monitoring and management software for StorageTek tape libraries.

Functionalities:

Simplifies tape management by eliminating manual intervention and helps improve operational efficiency at a cost as low as half that of IBM. (Comparison based on U.S. list price of IBM Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance and Oracle’s StorageTek Tape Analytics with a Sun Fire X2270 M2 server in 5,000 and 575 slot environments.)
Captures library, drive and media performance metrics and presents them in a single pane of glass, and can proactively identify potential problems while providing recommendations to prevent data loss.
Allows drill-down into detailed drive and media health specifics, enabling customers to proactively make decisions about their tape infrastructure, and reduce downtime and data management resources.
Offers a set of key capabilities versus IBM’s Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance.

Oracle customers can:

Monitor tape infrastructure globally from a single analytics management server deployment. This single, global view is also for customers with cloud deployments using tape for backup or archive. Additional management servers and switches are not required at each library location, resulting in increased cost savings as systems scale.
Utilize the management server to gather data directly from the tape libraries, rather than interrupting the data path and exposing sensitive data to a separate monitoring environment.
Deploy tape monitoring software that scales to meet the needs of the largest archives. The software monitors the health of the tape infrastructure for the life of its deployment without purging historical health data to make room for monitoring new devices.
Receive recommendations for their tape media, drives and libraries based on over 40 years of tape expertise.

StorageTek Tape Analytics software is available exclusively for Oracle’s StorageTek Modular Library Systems.
It provides a solution that includes Oracle 11g Recovery Manager,Oracle Secure Backup, Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager software running with Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux, Oracle’s SPARC and Sun x86 servers, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, Oracle Database Appliance, Oracle’s Sun Storage and Oracle’s StorageTek Tape.

"Oracle’s StorageTek Tape Analytics software allows customers better insight into the health of their tape environments and arms them with the information to maximize the value of their storage investments," said James Cates, VP, Hardware Development, Oracle. "Ideal for backup and archive data residing locally or in the cloud, Oracle’s approach is secure, efficient and cost effective. Its savings for customers can be quite substantial as it does not require special media, but rather it works with the customer’s existing supported media, regardless of the vendor."

"Oracle’s StorageTek Tape Analytics software provides extensive statistics which are critical for expert operation and planning of a large distributed tape system," said Jason Hick, NERSC Storage Systems Group Lead at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "StorageTek Tape Analytics gathers statistics outside the data path which is important for data security and eliminating impact on the tape system."

"Oracle’s StorageTek Tape Analytics software will greatly simplify tape management and help storage administrators proactively monitor the health of their tape infrastructure," said Robert Amatruda, Research Director of Data Protection and Recovery at IDC. "This proactive approach to tape management will ultimately lead to significant time and cost savings for storage administrators."

Webcast on StorageTek Tape Analytics software (registration needed)