I've been looking around for a long time for a product that would fulfill my 
scientific data archiving needs. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there is 
a product that does both file/metadata management AND media management in any 
sort of intelligent fashion.

As such, I'm probably going to use one of the packages out there that handles 
files/metadata well, and simply have it store things to a system that has HSM 
on it.

The question then is:

1. What are people experiencing for lifetimes on their DLT7000 media?  If I 
know what to expect, I can either not guarantee things longer than that, or I 
can manually "refresh" my dates by duplicating and erasing previous copies.

2. Am I missing something? Does anyone know of a better package for doing 
archiving?  I need to have automated, user-interactive, and scheduled 
archiving of files from both NT and Unix. I need to collect metadata about the 
files (data from inside the file: Experiment number, compound, etc.) I want to 
store the data in an Oracle database so that I can do metadata searches for 
files, and then somehow interact with my media management system to retrieve 
the files.  I need to be able to specify retention levels for files, etc.

It appears that NB + Storage Migrator could do some of this, but I'd be left 
to write the whole front end myself.  I'd rather not do this, especially since 
the software is regulated by the FDA in a certain sense.

Anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks.

-- 
Andy Steingruebl              | e-mail: steingra AT pprd.abbott DOT com         
 
Unix Systems Admin/Programmer | phone:  (847) 935-4728                    
Unix/Network Security         | fax:    (847) 935-0142                    
Abbott Laboratories, PPDR&D   | post:   100 Abbott Park Road, D472 - AP9A
                              |         Abbott Park, IL 60064-6115