Vital Records Inc - Services

Off-Site Data Protection | Media Audits / Inventories | Additional Services

TAPE LIBRARY AUDITS / INVENTORIES

We have more than 50 tape librarians already accustomed to working within a framework that demands just the right balance of speed and accuracy. This is a natural extension of our primary service.

Inventories fall into 2 categories:

- A SNAPSHOT inventory
- or -
- A DISTRIBUTED inventory

SNAPSHOT Inventory
Working closely with the customer, we take a “snapshot” of all tapes at a specific point in time. Since the tape inventory is changing every day, proper planning and timing are extremely important. We will account for all tapes in our facility, all tapes at the customer location and all tapes that are in transit while the inventory is being done. An electronic discrepancy report will be provided to the customer immediately upon completion of the inventory.

Typically for these types of inventories, the customer already has a viable Tape Management System (TMS) in place and the inventory is nothing more than a verification of the accuracy of that TMS. We have successfully completed snapshot inventories for libraries in excess of 500,000 tapes.

DISTRIBUTED Inventory
Distributed processing environments have been steadily growing. Companies often struggle with the task of labeling, managing and taking inventory of their tape media. What was a relatively straightforward task in mainframe environments, has become a real challenge in the distributed world. Not only is the actual processing distributed among multiple locations, so is the tape management. Location A may label their tapes one way while Location B may do something altogether different.

The “distributed” inventory is needed to bring a sense of order to these situations. The goals are to provide the customer with a complete, barcoded inventory of their current tapes. A way to manage their tapes going forward, and, most importantly, a detailed online inventory of all of their media.

Every tape will go through our inventory process, where VRI personnel will place a unique barcode label on each tape and will data enter the tape’s descriptive information (server name, create date, location, etc). This information is then posted online for the customer enabling them to gain control over what had previously been so difficult. We have performed this type of inventory for tape libraries as small as 1,000 tapes and in excess of 350,000 tapes.