ALTO Business Case - Operations

More flexible and accessible: ALTO is a scalable and flexible solution for content libraries, enterprise archive and work groups. It can provide a distributed systems with high availability and be configured in business continuity configurations. ALTO also enables the removal of disks from the ALTO chassis for media transportation, local media access, and vault storage. A disk removed from any ALTO will be recognized by any other ALTO and a disk can be opened offline with any standard computer

Faster archive and restore: When an operator requests content from a tape based archive the robotic system fetches the required tape and loads it into a drive, the drive forwards/rewinds the tape to the content linear location - a process of typically 10 to 15 seconds. Even at this point the content is not available as it has to be played out and stored on an on-line server. By contrast, ALTO takes only 3-4 seconds to power and spun up a disk, and once spinning offers random Access.

Improved access: Data Tape Archive systems typically support a limited number of tape drives. Access to any particular tape will depend on availability of  free drive. If all the drives are in use, then the request is placed into a queue by the Archive Manager and the user must wait for the Restore to take place. ALTO archives support many more concurrent users, offering faster access to content for many more users. ALTO Archives do not need routine maintenance, no Repack and no Migration