RMIT's IT department backs up and stores the bulk of the university's data which includes administrative systems, an online learning system, student records, and e-mail for 7000 staff and 55,000 students.

Tiered storage was introduced to cope with data growth rates of about 20 percent a year.

Paul Morton, the university's IT services data manager, said it was hard to manage when RMIT was backing up only to tape.

"We would set our backups for the night, then come in the next morning and find some hadn't worked, because tapes had failed or gotten stuck," he said, adding that this led to backups being done during the day to get the job done.

"The tape drives were pretty slow and we knew we had to upgrade our storage infrastructure."