Organizations performing services for the U.S. Government are held accountable for meeting strict standards as part of the services they provide. When engineers for the United States Airforce decided to address growing backup and restore problems, they turned to protecTIER, who deployed a new, director-class 4Gbps Fibre Channel fabric, a new IBM 3584 tape library with seven LTO-3 tape drives, and a virtual tape disk-to-disk solution using SATA drives. In choosing the virtual tape solution, the team worked with Ken Payne of Abba Technologies. One thing that sparked the team's interest was the proposed use of Diligent Technologies' unique ProtecTIER data protection platform with data de-duplication technology capable of shrinking the size of backup data on disk by as much as 25 times.