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Managing Media in Networked Environments
Michael Kramer
B&L Associates, Inc.
220 Reservoir Street, Ste. 15
Needham, MA 02494 USA
(781) 444-1404/5805 fax
mkramer@bandl.com
TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF OPEN SYSTEMS TAPE MANAGEMENT
The number of systems requiring offline tape management as well as the distribution of the location supported are generally much larger in an open systems environment. Therefore, a networked tape management system must be capable of scaling to a level that is different and more complex than what existed in mainframe-only environments. Yet, the tape management system must serve both local and enterprise levels simultaneously. This means that it must include multi-user, multi-platform, multi-site support so that the system can manage media from any location and provide quick response for recovery operations. A high capacity fibre channel enterprise storage network becomes the enabling technology for safely and efficiently managing media.
Tape management enables system managers to assign restrictions at two levels -- what the user can see, called a domain, and, within their domain, what they can do, called access. Domain security can be limited to a particular subset of volumes, users, hosts, sites, or any combination of the four. Access level parameters define what users can do in their assigned domain, such as add, inquire, edit, and delete items within their domain. An added security feature is multi-level purge protection, which requires that operators verify media scratch status at each step of the process before media is reused. Finally, tape management has audit capabilities that capture a history of all of the media in the system, including when media was manipulated and by whom.
Once the administrative setup is complete, daily operations -- logging media into the system and running lists for reconciliation, movements, and scratches (tapes that are now available for reuse) -- become automatic. Although list generation is very much the same as older tape management systems, logging relevant tape information into the tape management system is more of a challenge in an open systems environment due to the limitations imposed by newer operating systems.
