While heavily regulated and leading-edge organizations use dedicated systems to store their archival data, if you asked most IT managers where their archives were they'd point at a shelf of old backup tapes or the logbook of tapes at Iron Mountain. Similarly, legal hold meant taking a group of tapes out of the rotation and putting them on the shelf. When someone actually wanted all the documents and e-mail messages related to "The Incident," some poor backup boy had to restore all those tapes and use some e-discovery tool to find the pertinent data items.

If you've changed, or upgraded, your backup software, tape drives, or e-mail server, it may take that poor guy days just to prepare the infrastructure to restore to. Now you can send your box 'o tapes to CommVault and it will send back the documents and e-mails you need, all indexed up for you for just $80 a tape, even if you don't use its Simpana data protection suite.

The service is powered by Index Engine's tape engine appliance that can index, keyword search, and extract directly from backup tapes written by common backup applications, including NetBackup, TSM, Networker, and ArcServe, without having to restore them. Add in the array of tape drives CommVault has in its lab they use for testing Simpana Backup, previously Galaxy, and this is the perfect solution for finding the message from that old Exchange 5.5 backup on DLT4000 tapes.

Given that CommVault and Index Engines are headquartered just 20-odd miles apart on the Jersey shore, I can imagine execs from both companies coming up with the idea for this service at a PTA meeting or golf tournament at the local country club.

If you have more than 200 tapes to search through you may want to look at buying your own Tape Engine, but for those with smaller search requirements, CommVault's newest service offering could be a lifesaver.