Tape management in a storage networking environment

Today, the paradigm shift in storage architectures from direct-attached storage to storage area network and network-attached storage, and to emerging standards such as iSCSI, has a strong impact on the requirements for storage management software. The managed storage resources could be disks (from a few disks to a large disk subsystem) or tapes (from a single tape drive to large automated tape libraries). A key challenge in this field is the management of removable media such as tape, optical, or others. Besides having to keep track of a potentially enormous number of different volumes and maintaining records of important attributes such as media owner, age, I/O errors, media-pool affiliation, and much more, the open storage networking environment raises new questions. In a scenario in which the use of SCSI devices is no longer restricted to a small number of locally attached servers, security and robustness become increasingly important issues. Access conflicts must be carefully controlled, mount operations have to run in a robust manner, and it is mandatory to comply with a security concept that protects data as well as privacy and confidentiality. This paper concerns the new requirements for tape management systems in storage networking environments. It describes the challenges and relates these requirements to the standards that exist today.