The solution is easy to use.

Tape Management is as vital to a shop as anything else. It has more features than I could name, but no other tape product is better. CA 1 Tape is a complete package that manages all of your tapes. Create/write/catalog, retention, delete. There are queries and reports, which are needed to know when/where/length keeping, etc., in order to track them or find out current status. Each of these functions is managed for every tape there is, one being required for the next. Each is a bit more involved than it may seem, but 100% necessary.

Beyond these functions, each of them vital, are "fix" types of jobs. These are not a daily thing, but if anything is broken such as pointers, then we would need to get a copy of the pointers and follow them backward and forward to fix it/them. Literally everything about the product is great!

Now that I think about it, CA 1 Tape did introduce, in 14.0, a new group of functions in CTS that could be used or not. We do not because we have other things in place. The messages/alerts it can watch for would be handy, we just haven’t set it up.

At this point, we use it a lot for our DR and our business continuity stuff, our tape management, which is what we heavily rely on it for. To me, the CA 1 tool is the industry standard. I personally enjoy the fact that I get great support from CA. They're actively giving new improvements with every release and, really, the stability of it. I've had zero problems since I've installed it, so it's been great.

Mainly, we use the product to manage the tapes. It's so stable that we only use the graphical interface of the virtual tapes. Sometimes we use it to review some files to see the status of our archives. Mainly, we use it for backup and restoring our data.

My primary job is to make backups, backups a lot of backups. So being able to find out about where my data is, where my files are, and what tapes are used, is very valuable to me.

Tape management, Vault management