* Tracking tapes continued
Last week’s rant about tracking off-site tapes kicked off a string of e-mails from several of you. John, Indiana’s resident Storage Wise Guy, has dealt with this issue for years, and offers a simple guideline:
“Don’t accept the standard service contract. The state where I worked never did; we rewrote all of them to our liking. Call in the lawyers and have them write up the contract making the storage vendor responsible for the tape from the minute it leaves the tape library to the minute it returns.
“Yes, you end up with lots of paper signing tapes in and out – with a person from both your company and the storage vendor visually verifying and signing for each shipment – but that’s the price you pay.”
Several other readers pointed out to me that I had glossed over an even more fundamental problem with regards to archiving to tape – there is little value to tracking tapes if the tape content itself is unreadable in the first place.
I’ve covered this issue countless times in this newsletter over the last few years, but usually when I have spoken about unrecoverable data I have described the problem as the result of an interrupted backup process – a network brownout or an over-stepped backup window that cut short the backup operation.
There is another circumstance, however, that can cause tapes to be unreadable.
Tapes get used and, like most things in this world (the readers of this column excepted, of course), reliability degrades as time goes by. Often we keep using them however, caring for them as best we know how – stacking, redesigning, storing, and shipping them properly – and just keep hoping that each tape’s integrity maintains itself at a high level.
Tapes however, are a bit like some politicians – implicit trust in their integrity should never take the place of independent verification. All of which leads to the interesting question of just how do you make sure the tape that you bought last year can still be counted on to preserve your data?
Next time, I’ll tell you about a product I’ve found that can do just that.
*** StorageWorld Conference in Long Beach, Calif., takes place later this month. This conference differs from many of the others because, rather than being a “vendor love fest” where the vendors spend much of their time preening before their competitors, this gathering is really aimed at IT management and staffers (would you believe it’s actually FREE to IT-ers? It is).
If you’ll be there on June 21, please stop by and say hello. I’ll be running the SMB storage panel at 3 p.m. on that date and will sit in on as many analyst face-to-face sessions as time allows. Stop by and say hello – or take your best shot.
