* Keeping track of your storage tapes
As follow-on to a story I did on off-site archiving problems, “D”, one of my “Storage Wise Guys” (an informal group of readers who make a variety of contributions to this newsletter’s content) shared the following with me:
“I’ve been dealing with off-site tape ‘secure storage’ vendors since I started as a mainframe tape operator in 1990…I’ve lost count of the number of times they haven’t been able to locate a tape they were supposed to have. Or, even more scary, a BOX of tapes.
“In my experience, it never gets reported or followed up because the customer can’t verify they actually sent the tape in the first place, or the vendor can’t confirm they received it.
“The scary part is I’ve always worked in the financial industry – banks, finance, insurance, etc. That’s some fairly valuable data!
“And as for ‘the risk of any person accessing your personal information is unlikely’ [this refers to an apology letter sent by the company whose data was lost to its employees, when the company tried to assure its employees that they were not vulnerable to data theft], well what would a potential data thief need? A PC, an LTO (or DLT) tape drive, a NetBackup trial key, and a little bit of knowledge, or a manual.”
Tapes lost in transit have become a distressingly familiar part of the IT landscape lately, and have likely been a problem since the first prehistoric admin decided to archive the data on the first DASD – but if my “wise guy” correspondent is right, who knows?
Certainly, when it comes to tape identification a lot of us have implemented some reasonably good policies – automatic bar coding has helped here. Tracking tape movement inside the data center is also much better than it was in the bad old days, when racks of tapes got knocked over or individual tapes fell off a desk and rolled behind a filing cabinet, often never to be seen again. At some companies, this improvement has been imposed by a need to comply with “chain of custody” regulations, at others it has just happened because of an exercise of good, common sense.
Still, when tapes go out the IT room door and off to the loading dock, as often as not the process breaks down. As a result, where the weakest link in the custody chain might be becomes anybody’s guess.
Things can go astray at almost any point in the process, and most managers would never know where the problem occurred. Many technologies might be useful to track such items – existing bar codes might be used, and tracking tape movements might be an ideal application for RFID tags.
Just as useful however, although not nearly as efficient, might be a simple form that tracks the tape through each stage of its life – when it goes through the door to the IT room, when it reaches the loading dock, when the truck driver signs for it, and so forth. The process should begin the moment the tapes leave the IT floor, and should track each tape until it arrives at the vaulting site.
None of us got into IT because we wanted to become accountants, but we now spend lots of time calculating ROI and total cost of ownership. It’s a good bet that even fewer of us want to become inventory clerks at this point in our careers, but tracking the movement of valuable assets such as tape-based data may require that skill set from us all. A useful rule to remember for all of this: “off-site” begins on the far side of the IT room door.
*** Want to join the Storage Wise Guys? Share your experiences with me. If I use them in this column (identities of the innocent are protected at all times, of course), not only will you make a contribution to fellow storage users but you will also win a snazzy CERTIFICATE Of ACHIEVEMENT, suitable for framing and for use during any number of ego-gratification exercises. Sharing is good.
