Tape Audit

I've actually not done a total audit before, only running the scans to scan the 1000+ tapes in the automatic tape libraries and analyzing batch runs. It was a very interesting exercise though.

I found out a lot about tapes like

• aged tape - by age, by job, by which ever field I chose to sort - look for top 50 (or whatever number) and lowest 50 - that will lead to a whole list of action items for follow-up
• naming conventions
  
• tapes so old and taking up precious footprint within the tape libraries - tapes that should be replaced by those high-activity ones that require multiple mounts
• length of tape mounts
• which jobs have the most tape mounts, have the longest tape mounts
• how many tapes are required for each batch
• how often the tapes are waiting for tape drives and how long

All these lead to many service improvement project. One thing though, get all involved into a discussion. That way it'll be easier to get consensus on any changes.

One thing I didn't do is tape reconciliation - tape accounting of physical tapes.