Level Studios Acquiring Tandberg Tape Library T120+

LEVEL Studios, a Rosetta company, is a US-based digital agency that delivers marketing and product development services for global brands, and recently found itself in need of a more robust backup solution.

LEVEL works hard to provide superior integrated marketing and product development services, including interface and user experience design, video and motion graphics, search engine marketing and website and application development to its customers.

The company's backup storage requirements had grown by 100% over the previous year due to the growth of the business and the subsequent increase in the size and number of digital media files that needed to be stored.

With a mix of technology, business and creative teams, the LEVEL technology infrastructure is approximately half Windows and half Linux. Their backup storage requirements had grown, reaching approximately 18TB and the size of a tape backup had expanded beyond the capacity of the company's end-of-life tape library.

That required Mark Chester, senior network administrator at LEVEL, to spend dozens of hours per month reallocating capacity and re-archiving backups that had failed because they would run out of tape.

"The reviews of the Tandberg Data StorageLibrary T120+ were very positive, and it easily provided the capacity we needed," said Chester. "It also worked with the third-party backup software we were using, and the capacity per dollar met our expectations, especially when you consider the overall cost of hardware and services. In addition, by eliminating the hours spent maintaining the old system, the StorageLibrary gave us several additional hours per month to spend on high-value projects."

A main feature of the Tandberg Data StorageLibrary T120+ is its compatibility with major operating systems. Knowing that the tape library solution could perform across all LEVEL operating environments was a key factor in the decision to deploy the product.

Another reason that LEVEL chose the StorageLibrary was its rugged, metal construction for long-term operation. The tape drive, power supply and fans are all customer-replaceable units, allowing for replacement without removing the library from the rack. Scalable up to 342TB with performance up to 12TB/hr. (compressed), the StorageLibrary T120+ met the capacity and performance requirements needed by LEVEL.

"We're very pleased with our Tandberg Data solution, which has worked flawlessly," said Chester. "It isn't always easy to put a specific dollar amount on the ROI of a backup system until there's a disaster. Fortunately, we haven't had a disaster since installing our Tandberg Data system. The Tandberg Data StorageLibrary represents an extremely affordable insurance policy."

Today, Chester uses a three-layer backup strategy. His daily differential and weekly incremental backups required approximately 200GB of data. His full monthly backup is approximately 18TB. Moving forward, LEVEL plans to completely redefine its backup strategy and use the latest technologies, including deduplication and disk-to-disk backups.

"Even so, our Tandberg Data StorageLibrary will remain an important part of our long-term data backup solution," said Chester.