QStar has provided archive to tape for over 30 years and has become one of the leading providers of “gateway” solutions for archive content. For the last five years, QStar has worked with a variety of “next generation” enterprise backup vendors to provide tape-out features for their solution set that typically only supports private or public cloud storage.

Rubrik, Cohesity, Veeam and HYCU have integrated QStar Archive Manager for Tape into their solutions, to allow users to add tape for mandatory retention edicts, longer term access and ultimate disaster recovery options. Full backup content is periodically written via SMB or NFS to the archive gateway server and on to any tape library using any version of tape. Once written, typically media is exported and stored offsite or in a firesafe for air-gapped storage options. These backups continue to be managed by the application service level agreements (SLA) to legislate when each job can be deleted and that media re-used.

Each application uses QStar’s internal web services commands for enhanced information on barcodes and job completion. This can then be passed to the user through the backup application itself without the need to switch to the QStar application.

If required, additional shares or mounts can be created for file archive to tape or cloud or for connection to other third-party applications. QStar also supports S3 as a method to archive data to tape for remote archive options.