IN BRIEF/COMPILED BY STEVE BILLS

Sovereign Bancorp Inc. says that by backing up its computer servers to disk before putting the data on tape, it has cut costs and improved its support when users need files restored.

Joe Ambrosino, the network operations manager at the $47 billion-asset Philadelphia company, said it is already using the S2100-ES Virtual Tape Library system from Sepaton Inc. of Southborough,Mass., in three of its four data centers and is installing it at the fourth.

Sovereign signed on in February to use the system after a more than yearlong evaluation at the data center in Providence, R.I.

“We really gave the product a run for its money,”Mr. Ambrosino said in an interview last week.

Sovereign, which has grown rapidly in New England and elsewhere in the Northeast, sought a system that could meet the company’s ever-expanding data-backup needs.

The disk system is much faster than tape, with a data-transfer rate of 150 megabytes per second, compared to 6 megabytes per second using conventional tape drives.And the disks are less subject to mechanical problems than the robotic tape drives, which have more moving parts, Mr. Ambrosino said.

Sovereign does weekly backups to tape. It used to retain five weeks worth of tapes at its four data centers, and would store copies of those tapes indefinitely in an off-site archive.

Sovereign now stores two weeks of backed-up data on the “virtual tape library” disk array, and it continues to produce the weekly tapes for the archive from the disks.

But because it is now producing a single data tape where it formerly produced two, it has trimmed that expense and lightened the load on the tape machines. “Now I don’t have to juggle tapes,” he said.

“We’re not there yet, but Sepaton has us on its road map,”Mr.Ambrosino said.