HP StoreEver Ultrium Tape Drives - Manual (Page 8)

• Justify capacity increases with real data about usage.
• Maintain equipment with minimum disruption by:
• Knowing the remaining expected life of drives and tapes, and planning ahead for possible
maintenance and replacement.
• Finding out the health of drives and tapes, and about issues before hard failures occur.
• Receiving proactive advice on corrective actions.
• Finding out about the quality of backup data and its viability for long term storage. Receive
timely warnings and take pre-emptive action for any real issues.
• Reduce total cost of ownership through reduced downtime and disruption
Although these are normally considered enterprise features, they apply equally to all applications of
tape based backup and are therefore available with all HP LTO-based devices, from standalone drives
to enterprise class libraries.
NOTE:
TapeAssure works with HP LTO-3 and later drives, and so can be used in many existing installations.
Architecture
TapeAssure incorporates HP’s industry-leading diagnostic tool, L&TT, into the data collection solution.
L&TT pulls support tickets and runs a full diagnostic analysis on the tape drive, tape and data at the
end of each backup.
Figure 1 TapeAssure architecture for standalone tape drives
.
The TapeAssure service runs as a Windows service which can be started and stopped in the same
way as any other Windows service from the Services view of the Computer Management window.
All HP Ultrium-based tape system types are supported by TapeAssure:
• Standalone drives – the TapeAssure service, running on the backup server, pulls the support ticket
from the drive (in band) and sends it to Command View TL for analysis and presentation.
Introduction 8