* Protecting the lifecycle of your tape
A time-honored tradition in IT is the box of “scratch tapes” in the back room. Cartons of used-but-presumably-still-serviceable tapes can typically be found in a back storeroom at most sites, or in bottom drawers of desks. Tape monkeys who need a tape in a hurry have been known to dip into this cache. Sometimes the tapes work, sometimes…
Many IT managers today embrace the idea of information lifecycle management (ILM). It is odd then that they haven’t also gotten used to the idea that the media itself may have a lifecycle as well.
In fact, the concept of media lifecycle has a great deal of currency in digital archiving and rich media environments – broadcasting, content creation, and so forth – but in this case, the term has a somewhat different meaning. For broadcasters and such, “media lifecycle” is similar in meaning to what most in IT think of as ILM: it traces the movement of digital content from its original creation to its archiving stage, mapping each stage (as in ILM) to a particular storage medium.
The issue today, however, is more fundamental: it concerns the lifecycle of tapes.
Tapes deteriorate at a fairly predictable rate. The three major contributors to a tape’s demise are age (tapes get brittle as they get older, like people), how well the tape has been treated (was it kept on the shelf next to a large loudspeaker, or near the ionic air freshener you had to install because of doubts about your officemate’s commitment to personal hygiene?), and how many times the tape has been used.
In most cases, tracking the life of a particular piece of media has been an impossible task. As a result, managers retire media only when it is obviously broken or when the last device that might have used it is itself retired.
Hi-Stor is a relatively unknown company to North American IT managers, but it’s well known to a number of U.S. tape vendors for whom it has provided some key technology over the last decade. Last week I examined Hi-Stor’s flagship product, StorSentry tape library protection software, and found a nice answer to this problem.
StorSentry collects data on both libraries and the media inside them. Two things differentiate the software from most of its competitors: First, it collects and analyzes data (based on read/write operations) on the health of a wide and heterogeneous mix of drives within libraries. It diagnoses the problems, provides predictive reports on the machines’ health, and suggests corrective actions.
Second, it tracks each piece of media, keeping track of every mount and use through each stage of its life. This allows it to show managers all pertinent data regarding each piece of media – bit error rates, deterioration rates, number of mounts, etc. When the software determines media is nearing its end of life (a calculation apparently based on the vendor’s life expectancy for the tape calculated against the number of mounts and hours of usage, and measured against user-defined thresholds), it alerts the IT staff, who may then take appropriate action to replace to cartridge.
The solution applies to LTO, DLT, and SDLT devices, to a number of StorageTek (now Sun) 9000-series and smaller libraries, and to the new “Scalar” series devices from ADIC, among others. It works in conjunction with most major backup and archiving software.
Unreadable tapes are of course a terrific security measure, but their value doesn’t go much beyond that. On the other hand, understanding the viability of your media before you use it should go a long way towards making sure that what you write today, you can read next year. StorSentry provides that capability.
*** 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.
