Open Reel (9-Track) Tape Retirement
Recently eMag announced the end of life for open reel (9-track) tape, which eMag produced in its Graham, Texas facility for over 30 years. eMag has determined that the significantly decreased demand for this once dominant magnetic media format mandated an organized end of life announcement and program.
To provide an orderly and seamless transition for users of open reel (9-track) tape technology, eMag spent over 3 years developing alternative solutions that have proved to be both operationally efficient and cost effective. As with all retiring products, the problems facing us for 9-track tape media are:
- Increased production costs, and therefore increased market prices
- Decreased availability, and longer lead times
- Technology becoming unreliable, and requiring higher maintenance charges
- Technology migration proving difficult with varying exit strategies
eMag currently offers ways to achieve the following two common 9-track objectives:
I'd like to retire my 9-track hardware, but clients and vendors are keeping me on the technology. How can I get around this? Data Distribution
Data Distribution is a key service provided by eMag. Many companies have already turned to eMag to help them quickly and painlessly get off 9-track tape technology and still service their clients and vendors, often more effectively, and always at a lower cost. Imagine: no 9-track hardware, no resource needed to distribute data, lower distribution costs, less headache, and a solution that can easily be adopted for the next legacy medias.
I'd like to retire my 9-track hardware, but need a cheaper solution to keep distributing data to my clients and vendors.
eMag's MediaMerge/PC product allows you or your client to send or receive data in whatever tape form you wish. You could retire your 9-track mainframe drives, and have a desktop PC with our software loaded and a SCSI-attached 9-track tape drive. Then, when a client insists on receiving the data on a 9-track tape, simply write the data from the mainframe as normal, but perhaps write it to a 3480. Our solution lets you convert to a 9-track tape, or to any other tape type. It even has the capability to change formats so the output tape could be read, for example, on an AS/400, or a UNIX system. It can even convert to ASCII format and write it out as a CD.