"Clearly, if something goes bad, you need to be able to ... figure out what tape sets are bad or which tape sets are at risk, and have those recreated or whatever you need to do," Baltazar said.

Among the steps that need to be carried out and verified is "re-tensioning," similar to tightening an audiocassette to make sure it can advance smoothly, he said.

"Even though tapes are designed to be held for decades, there's still a lot of maintenance that goes into that," Baltazar said. Management software can eliminate some of the administrator tasks required to make those maintenance steps take place, he said.

StorageTek Tape Analytics works exclusively with the StorageTek Modular Library System and is available now. Sun Microsystems acquired StorageTek in 2005 and subsequently was bought by Oracle in 2009. Oracle is now one of the world's largest tape infrastructure vendors, along with Spectra Logic, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

The IDG News Service