Tape Stacking and Archiving
Physical tape storage is expensive, and so if many tapes are stacked onto new high capacity tapes, the cost of long-term archives can be reduced considerably. There is also the added bonus of more reliable modern media.
An old open reel tape ( 9 track tape) can store approximately 120MB, and a 3480 can store about 200MB. Many tapes though are not filled up and so may only have for instance 30MB. With a modern 3590 or LTO many hundreds of tapes may be stored on a single cartridge. The next big advantage is that it then becomes very cost effective to have multiple copies of these stacked tapes which could be stored in multiple locations for security purposes. Thus a single copy of 1000 open reel tapes could be placed on just one LTO which could then be duplicated several times to ensure total data reliability with tapes stored on several sites.
The other major reason for stacking is that open reel tape drives are near the end of their life, and some companies are no longer maintaining the drives. In addition the media is now becoming hard to read with many old tapes suffering from stiction and oxide peeling of the tape. It is therefore very sensible to determine which tapes are readable, which need recovering and possibly which have been lost.
eMag can provide a solution to the above problems through a range of services such as tape cleaning and stacking. eMag can also arrange to do a library profile and give a full catalog of which tapes are in the tape library.
When the tapes are stacked, a full index is created so that individual datasets or volumes may be extracted onto compatible media (which may well be different to the original media). In addition the stacked tapes are valid tapes that could be scanned as a foreign tape by most computer systems. Tape stacking can greatly reduce your tape storage costs.
For most applications we will offer a service so please contact us with any questions or a request for a quote. We can also offer our MediaMerge/PC product to do the work which may be very important when very secure data is being handled. Operation is extremely simple and all that needs to be selected is the input and output drive and output density which will be given as a choice dependent on the type of output tape being used.
Features of MediaMerge/PC
- All SCSI tape drives supported, 3480, 3590, 4mm DAT, 8mm Exabyte, DLT, DC600, LTO etc
- All logical tape formats can be read
- Log of datasets on labeled tapes kept
- Any length of tape to tape duplication
- Multi-volume / stacking handled
- Blocks greater than 64KM
- Dual partition tapes
- Log of filemarks and block sizes kept
- Very easy to use
- Conversion Service Centers available