Iron Mountain Media Imaging Services

With Iron Mountain’s Media Imaging services you can eliminate legacy backup infrastructure and software licensing fees while aggregating your data offsite in a more manageable archive.

Business challenge

As organizations switched to a mix of disaster recovery backups and long-term data archives to satisfy both business continuity and compliance requirements, more and more backup tapes have remained in rotation. However, since most information stored on backup tapes is inactive and infrequently accessed, keeping so many tapes and maintaining backup tape infrastructure and software can be a burden for IT.

You could keep the status quo and add more tapes to your library as more data is created, overwrite tapes with new backups and dispose of older tapes as data reaches the end of its retention period, but what if you could simplify backup operations and migrate to newer technology while also retaining access to all your data.

Iron Mountain Media Imaging services

Iron Mountain offers media imaging services that can create an image file of each backup tape (or other storage media) and securely stores each imaged file offsite where it remains accessible to you should you ever need your data back. With this approach, you can:

• Maximize storage capacity: Move data on legacy tapes to newer generation tapes, which have a higher storage capacity, helping you to reduce the number of tapes in your inventory. You can also securely store imaged data in our Iron Cloud.
• Eliminate tape and modernize IT operations: Archive legacy data by imaging each tape so you can migrate to disk or the cloud for go-forward data backup and archiving.

With Iron Mountain’s media imaging services, you can eliminate existing tape infrastructure, software and your tape library, migrate to newer backup technology while still archiving and retaining access to your data. Imaged files can be stored on disk or in the cloud so you can digitize your data, allowing you to securely destroy legacy backup tapes, but still retain access through a fully-managed restoration program.

How it works

1. Iron Mountain creates an image file of each tape, the tape catalog and library.
2. As tapes are processed, each image file is and can be stored on disk or the cloud (depending on your requirements). 
   1. Alternatively, the image files may also be “stacked” or aggregated onto a newer generation tape technology
3. If you need data restored, you make a request to Iron Mountain.
4. Iron Mountain retrieves the desired image files and uses the appropriate backup software to restore your data (much like restoring data from physical tapes.) 
   1. Depending on volume, data restored may be returned to you via a hard drive, data shuttle, or secure internet connections.

What you gain

Technology changes all the time, and with each refresh you face new infrastructure and software costs while you are also paying maintenance costs for legacy systems and infrastructure. With Iron Mountain’s Media Imaging Services you can eliminate these costs while aggregating your data offsite into a more manageable archive, so you can:

• Move from tape storage to disk or cloud storage
• Preserve data, but eliminate aging IT systems and infrastructure
• Satisfy backup and archive requirements
• Access and restore data when you need it most
• Maintain regulatory compliance of your archive data
• Reduce overall storage costs