Stan Horwitz wrote:
> Greetings everyone;
> 
> What are my options for tracking LTO-3 tape media? We are sending more and
> more LTO-3 tapes off-site. Some of our tapes site in off-site storage, some
> in a closet next to our tape library, and of course, a good deal of the
> tapes site in our tape library.
> 
> Keeping track of our tape cartridges is getting to be a real challenge. We
> need a good inventory tracking system here, but so far, the only off-the
> shelf product I found via googling seems to have gone defunct. I have set up
> a pretty good manual system, but it definitely has to be temporary because I
> will never get management to agree to let our operators handle the procedure
> on an ongoing basis.
> 
> I have a perl script that runs on my NetWorker 7.4.4 Linux server once a day
> that identifies tapes with data on them that needs to be sent off-site, then
> it withdraws the tapes and sets the mmlocate field for each one to
> "off-site", but receiving tapes back on-site requires me to manually update
> the location field.
> 
> What I am hoping for is a system where I can have an operator swipe the bar
> code that our off-site company uses, plus the bar code that NetWorker uses,
> put them into a database, then have a script read the database and issue the
> appropriate mmlocate commands to keep NetWorker in sync since we can't
> always load tapes that are returned to us into our tape library.

Alphastor can do this. This is one of the things it was originally
designed to do, and of course later they added the library management
functionality from SmartMedia. I don't have first hand experience of
this, so can't recommend it other than when I saw a presentation on it
some years ago it looked pretty good. I am sure other similar products
exist.

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