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Managing a Tape Environment Is No Longer an Oxymoron: Page 2 of 6

In fact, many engineering disciplines come together in a tape environment, including mechanical and electrical engineering. A tape automation environment has three basic elements:

Tape automation -- typically a tape library built around robotic arms whose movements are a triumph of mechanical engineering.

Tape drives -- which ingest tape cartridges, control the movement of tape along tightly defined paths and expel full tape cartridges to be moved by the library robot to an available storage slot.

Tape cartridges -- these compact and secure huge amounts of data in a small space using sophisticated technology.

The interplay of these three elements is interesting to watch, resembling a dance routine running at high speed (such as the movement of a robotic arm). However, natively these elements do not capture much information that can be used in their management. In fact, management of the tape environment is likely to be reactive instead of proactive, such as repairing a tape drive that refuses to ingest or eject a tape or replacing a tape cartridge that cannot be read (a very bad thing if it is part of a major recovery process).