Iron Mountain timing and DRMEDIA

[cooneyk]

From time to time we do a reconciliation with Iron Mountain and find that scores of tapes that we request never come back from IM over the course of several months. Today, we think we found the cause but don't know what, if anything, we can do about it from a TSM standpoint.



For example, last night TSM checked in 42 of 46 volumes requested the day before. We have learned that the 4 volumes that did not come back were sent offsite the day before and were reclaimed later that same evening/overnight by TSM. When IM is pulling tapes for us for the next day, they have not checked in the volumes they picked up the day previous, and they send back only what they "have" onsite.



These volumes are checked out by DRMEDIA and they have only a tiny amount of data on them, and that's why reclamation is calling them back so soon after being sent to IM. To TSM these volumes are in VAULT status, but to IM they may not have checked the previous day's volumes into THEIR vault (their inventory site tells us they're not at IM)



We'll look into this with IM to see why they aren't checking in tapes before they pull the group for the next day's delivery. My guess is they pull 'em shortly after they get our retreive list (at 3PM) regardless of whether that days' deliveries have been scanned in at IM.

 

[heada]

I use IM as well and had the exact same issue. What we did was a manual process until the operators complained enough that I set a reuse delay of 3 days. The volumes will sit offsite for a minimum of 3 days before they enter the vaultr status. Adding a reuse delay increased the number of volumes that remain offsite so you may need to increase your scratch pool to compensate.



Good luck.



-Aaron

 

[sgabriel62]

Iron Mountain seems to be everyone's friend. We too had to do the same thing with reconcilation of offsite media with Iron Mountain. In cases we get "nuisance" reports or reports outside normal processing by DRM, and this tells us that Iron Mountain has checked in media into their database that was different from our electronic transmissions.

What happens with us with these reports, is they (IM) does not know what schedule to place this media, so they dont place it in any category. Once an audit is accomplished, these media are found, pulled and returned.

I don't see anything or any other way around it - unless we all want to work for them and manage tens of millions of pieces of media.



Good luck everyone