ALTO's Business Case: Technical Factors
Easier to integrate: A tape based archive can be a complex installation - physically large and requiring a purpose built clean environment. An ALTO archive installation is very straightforward and can be completed in less than one hour - requiring no special environmental provisions. ALTO is a high density modular storage solution offering up to 1.2 Petabyte of raw storage in a standard equipment rack.  ALTO does not need to be integrated with any middleware to operate (archive manager, MAM etc).

Increased reliability: ALTO is built on an extremely robust platform with an embedded 64 bit Linux OS, which provides a virus proof and highly secure archiving solution, complete with hot swappable disks, fans and power supplies, with monitoring and alarms. There is no requirement for any planned maintenance or downtime with ALTO. ALTO archives provide a far longer disk life than RAID storage systems as disks are spun down and powered off, with significantly faster rebuild than RAID when required.  

Reduced maintenance: A robotic tape based archive solution requires regular maintenance, with specialist skills and components. RAID based archive solutions reduce the maintenance required significantly, but with a disk life expectancy of only 3 to 5 years and long RAID disk rebuild time, maintenance time can still be significant. By contrast, the disks in an ALTO have a significantly longer life expectancy and even when they do need replacing, disk rebuild can be done in a fraction of the time.