Mobius Management Systems` innovative INFOPAC-TapeSaver product, now available through Bateleur Software, affords South African data centres the opportunity to save vast sums on tape cartridges and data centre expansions by utilising tape cartridge capacity to the full and eliminating wastage. Under-utilisation of tapes is extremely common in the data centre environment. A study by Gartner Group of more than 1-million volumes showed that over 50% contained small, single volume datasets. Overall, the study found, only a fraction of the available cartridge capacity was utilised. The problem was not that enhanced tape technologies did not deliver increased capacity and more reliable automated operation. Rather, data centres were needlessly purchasing thousands of cartridges because technology was not being provided as part of the hardware solution to ensure efficient cartridge utilisation. Aside from direct costs incurred in purchasing tapes, excessive costs were allocated to expensive raised floor space for storage of single-volume datasets at the data centres. Mobius, in line with its pioneering concept of `intelligent tape dataset management`, developed INFOPAC-TapeSaver to address the problem and allow data centres to gain immediate and dramatic improvements in resource utilisation. Sam Selmer-Olsen, director of Bateleur Software, comments "INFOPAC-TapeSaver is the key efficiency factor behind the Mobius Document Warehouse. "This is a fully integrated suite of products allowing management to gain maximum insight from the vast amount of information contained in diverse company documentation. "INFOPAC-TapeSaver, together with DocuAnalyser, provides management with immediate access to datamining specific information for specific business requirements, at minimal storage expense." INFOPAC-TapeSaver users world-wide have freed up hundreds of thousands of tapes and saved millions of rands in tape and data centre expansion costs. AT&T, owner of the world`s largest installation of robotics with over 300 robotic devices and more than 1-million cartridges, used INFOPAC-TapeSaver to reduce its library by half a million cartridges. As a result of implementing INFOPAC-TapeSaver, 16 000 scratch cartridge were freed up each week. One data centre alone saved the equivalent of R2,45-million by reducing the number of cartridges by 90 000. These were just some of the benefits gained from introducing Mobius` `intelligent tape dataset management` into the environment. At the heart of INFOPAC-TapeSaver is an extremely powerful, flexible and user-friendly rule-based decision support tool that allows users total control over the stacking-up process. Using Boolean logic and any attribute of the tape management catalog (TMC), users define rules, according to their specific requirements, that determine what gets stacked, when stacking should occur and the placement of data to the appropriate device. Once stacking is defined, INFOPAC-TapeSaver actually simulates the entire process before any data is moved and produces a detailed forecast report. Powerful `what-if` capabilities provide complete control over the outcome, to the point of being able to forecast what would happen if data were migrated from current drives to, say, higher capacity devices. In addition, INFOPAC-TapeSaver maximises the long-term benefits of virtual tape technology by first consolidating datasets before stacking logical volumes on physical devices. The system can simulate the capacity requirements for a virtual tape subsystem (VTS) implementation, identifying both inclusions and exclusions and analysing proprietary formats to determine what level of non-VTS resource to retain. Other powerful features of the system include comprehensive optimisation of robotic tape devices such as StorageTek`s Automated Tape Libraries and others. DiskSaver, an optional disk-to-tape module, consolidates datasets as it intelligently moves them from DASD to tape. INFOPAC-TapeSaver is easy to install and use. It requires no modification to the operating system, JCL or TMC, and does not impact production processing.
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