We’ve used Iron Mountain for years and they’ve never had this requirement.   We use the “transports” (their boxes) to put multiple tapes in without the original plastic cases after ejects.    The return tapes come back in the same kind of transports.   Within the last year or so IM seems to have moved from the metal “transports” to thick plastic ones.

I don’t understand the comments about “archiving”.   The point in using IM or any other center is so that you don’t lose both your data center AND your backups in the same disaster.

Of course you could avoid tapes altogether by using a deduplication unit like the Data Domain or the Quantum DXi and having that replicate images to similar units at the offsite storage facility.   If they’re really paranoid about tape movement where you are this might be an alternative they could investigate.  

Hello Dean,

I have specific experience in this space.  If the tapes are stored in clean environments and are not dropped or damaged, I have restored data up to 4-5 years old (.. the data was from 2005—which was restored in 2009-2010) without a problem.

If you have cross-site backups between datacenters and you have enough capacity to hold all of the tapes in the robots, I agree with you, keep the data (if you are doing cross-site backups) in the bots themselves.

However, if you’re pushing petabytes you’ll have to eject tapes or buy a lot of large robots, in which case, sending the tapes off to an off-site tape vendor is one of the options.  Alternatively you can buy a GEMTRAC, which is like a bookshelf for tapes—but as you noted the environment needs to be correct, if there are a lot of particulates in the air, they *will* damage the tapes and cause read errors.

Justin.