SUMMARY: Tape Inventory Software

From: Thomas Bates <bates_at_atlantis.its.dist.maricopa.edu>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 12:18:04 -0700 (MST)

Well, I received a lot of responses..


Original Question:

We're a large community college in the Southwest that is looking for tape
inventory software suggestions.

We're mostly a DEC UNIX shop, but we do have BSDi, Sun, as well as
VAX/VMS.
 
We're trying to find some software that simply 'tracks' tapes. Basically
the operator would enter the information regarding that tape into the
system, and the program would generate purge reports, tape location
information, etc.

Every tape catalog product I've found is designed to work with it's own
backup product; We tried and avoid that. This is just basically a
database of tape information, so that our operations staff still runs the
backups with the standard tools, (UNIX vdump, VAX backup), but we can look
in the database for specific tapes.

If anyone is aware of a commerical product such as this, or even one that
someone wrote and we could modify, would be appreciated.

----
Most people said that they've been very happy with Legato Networker, and
we've messed with it a little bit.  Unfortunately, simply due to the size
of our operations and the number of different platforms we have, it's a
licensing issue.  Also we didn't like how we had to handle Oracle database
shutdowns and hot backups.  We also do some Oracle exports directly to
tape drives at night, and you can't do this with Networker.
I did get a message about a product called VTMS from Vytalnet.  It did
have some potential, but it's a Windows-centirc product, and runs on a
standalone machine with a SyBase back end.  
Another user wrote their own in MS Access.   =:)
What I think we'll end up doing is finishing what I've started in Oracle
PL/SQL using Oracle WebServer 2.1.. I think I should start selling it when
I finish, as I haven't found something that works very well.
Thanks to:
Anthony Miller <anthony.miller_at_vf.vodafone.co.uk>
Daniel Gill <danielg_at_vytalnet.com>
Blake Roberts <blarob_at_hbsi.com>
Ed Bush <edbush_at_llnl.gov> 
Yvon Lauriault <yvon.lauriault_at_nlc-bnc.ca> (Who also suggested CA's
Unicenter Tape Management Product)
Thomas
--
                  Thomas Bates - Database/UNIX Administration
       bates_at_atlantis.its.dist.maricopa.edu - Maricopa Community Colleges
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           "A day job...in an office? My worst nightmare!" - The Tick

Received on Wed Sep 30 1998 - 19:19:06 NZST