A significant number of tapes being saved these days contain data that is no longer of business value. Many tapes hold data on relatively low-density media, and many offsite containers are inefficiently packed. All of these factors contribute to an unnecessarily large number of tape containers being stored per GB of data, resulting in larger than necessary recurring offsite storage expenditures — costs that only increase in time as offsite storage vendors continue to raise prices, and the technical difficulties associated with recovering older data sets mounts.

Complicating offsite archive reduction efforts, however, is the fact that many older tape volumes (let alone their contents) are no longer being actively tracked by backup server databases. Pools of dark data are literally lost in warehouses. Many companies no longer have visibility into much of what they are paying to store, let alone accurate records of which tapes can actually be purged.

STORMATRIX helps to resolve these issues by leveraging our experience in reconstructing older backup server indexes and helping to formalize data retention policies that can then be used to identify, and purge, data that is no longer of continuing business value. Other data sets can be migrated to newer, denser media (and/or cloud storage), and storage containers are efficiently repacked.