Tape Drive and Library Technology .
The reason I selected this topic is based upon a requirement at work to learn about tape drives and libraries. In the ever-changing world of technology, diversity can sometimes add value to justifying your employment. I currently work on the server team help desk for Hewlett-Packard Company. Since outsourcing has taken another dimension and most technology companies are jumping on the band wagon to outsource most of their support center jobs, diversification is important to keep employment in this ever changing world of Information Technology. Since most companies want to safe guard their data, another technology that compliments computers/servers are tape drives and libraries. .
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Tape drives and libraries are an industry standard for archiving data. The reason most companies want to archive their data is to preserve space on their hard drives for more current (active) data. To free up space on their hard drives, they can backup data using several COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) backup software like, Veritas, Lagato, or Arc Serv. Backing up their data on tape cartridges frees up space on the hard drives and provides a medium to store the data for a long time without compromising the integrity of the data. .
You can either perform hardware compression or software compression. Hardware compression is much more efficient and faster than software compression. Software compression requires overhead to calculate the compression and to write/read the data to/from the media. Each tape drive and COTS software offer data compression to compress the data on the tapes to get more data in the same space. Usually the "theoretical- compression rate is 2:1 (Storage Technology and Web Base Training 1). I say theoretical, because depending on the density of the data will depend on how much data compression rate you'll get. For instance, JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) and MPEG (Movie Picture Experts Group) files are already compressed, therefore the compression rate will probably be 1:1 no compression - from the tape drive or COTS software anyway.