What do you like best about TapeTrack?
Disclaimer: I speak from my own personal experience. Not my company's, not an official endorsement, etc.
TapeTrack was completely flexible and open ended, with a robust set of tools on-server to process the data YOU hand it. Binaries came in all the flavors we required; Solaris, Linux, Windows, you name it. This means there was no "one way to do things".
Our actual Tape Team and NOT the Backup Team coordinated the effort of migrating to TapeTrack from Brand X, which yielded a couple of benefits; The Backup Team was freed up to not have to hassle with implementing a new software package, and the Tape Team, who is naturally more closely married to and familiar with, the eject processes in place could coordinate with Gazillabyte to achieve maximum flexibility for the entire process.
A few key criteria were handed down from management on eject frequency, tape retention, special cases and we were free to work with the Gazillabyte Team to get the desired results. We are dealing with dozens of tape libraries and master servers and TapeTrack handles them all like a champ! Sure, we ran into a couple of challenges, but we were able to hammer those out in a minimum of time thanks to Gazillabyte's excellent technical support. The support we received ranged from scripting, parsing, coordinating downloads of inventories from our Off Site storage of media, all the way to implementing custom features into the TapeTrack main branch of binaries for all flavors of OS's. I found this last item incredible. When we had Brand X tape management, I had only seen two updates in 8 years of working with it. With Tape Track, I've had at least 6 major revisions that I can count with new functionality added. And guess what? Before you even think it, NO, these revisions didn't break anything in the already spectacular implementation we had in place. I know right?! The way we have our implementation running is pretty neat, we query each of our masters using NetBackup's nbemmcmd command every day, list all media for a particular master, pass all the data to TapeTrack so it gets the freshest data (As of that morning, you can simply run the script manually if you need up-to-the-second data) and then runs reports, generates movelists or whatever against the data using your own custom criteria. For example, you can say "Create a movelist for every tape that hasn't been written to in the last 3 days" or "Create a movelist using only tapes that are full", and these are all from nbemmcmd's 54 fields of data for querying media. This allows for a TON o flexibility for ejecting different tapes with different images or policies or volume pools.
I'm rambling, but did I mention the GUI? Yeah, the Windows version's GUI is spec-freaking-tacular. The ability to highlight media and cut and paste them out to the paste buffer is worth the price alone. I mean it! Why does this get me so excited? We didn't have that ability using Brand X's desktop client, or the web-client. Something SO simple as far as functionality goes was missing from the Brand X's implementation of this Enterprise-Level software solution. UNACCEPTABLE!! Thank goodness TapeTrack had it implemented from day-one. The ability to PASTE in to TapeTrack from the paste buffer too is fantastic. Again, with Brand X, we couldn't do that. Had to save out to a text file, and then import it. Oh, you wanted data from Brand X in your paste buffer? Nope. Export it to a text file. These SIMPLE features in TapeTrack are just a breath of fresh air. When dealing with several thousand media in your paste buffer, it's great you can just paste it on into TapeTrack. And, if TapeTrack doesn't see some of the media, it lets you know, lists the unfound media, and then proceeds to ask "Hey, you've pasted a ton of media here, do you want me to only show the media you just pasted?" Uhhh, yes please. BAM!
Does your management team like reports? Of course they do! Audits and health checks? Heck yes! TapeTrack has you covered. Using the flexible report generation, you can custom craft a report with a blend of flags; Generate a report showing only tapes for our Sacramento tape library that are flagged as being overdue for ejects, AND on a movelist, AND being flagged as needing audit. Want to show EVERY media globally that have a combination of flags? Or just flagged for moves? Yeah, wildcards, TapeTrack has them. Just do it already.
Does your management team like asking for features they said they didn't want or need a couple weeks back? Yeah, mine too. The team at Gazillabyte is very responsive and has implemented some none-too-minor feature additions to the base-product. These have made us allstars to the management team.
Do you use Corodata for offsite storage? Chances are they use TapeTrack as well, and you'll have real-time access to your inventory offsite. BONUS!! If you don't use them, most other offsite folks can set up a repeating FTP for you so you can automated the download and parsing of the media from your account with TapeTrack. We do this every morning and it's pretty handy!! Never can be too careful with your media.
Are you handy with scripting on your NetBackup servers? The sky's the limit to what you want to retrieve and how you want to parse it. Use TapeTrack's built-in CSV parsing tool to massage your data into something digestible by TapeTrack and you can have your way with all of your media by any means of your choosing. Again, this kinda repeats the above, but using nbemmcmd to return only certain fields, you can custom craft what you want your rulesets to be for marking tapes for ejects/movelists, reports, etc. VERY cool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about TapeTrack?
A couple of minor peeves, and to be fair, these aren't the fault of Gazillabyte just my own preferences conflicting with theirs.
The flags you can set in the filter to display media by flag type; overdue, moving, audit, etc. stay in there when you go from library to library.
Sometimes we want to lock a tape from moving, usually because we've recalled it from offsite for a restore. To do this, you must go through several steps. Sure, you can select multiple media, but to set the "MOVE LOCK" flag you have to right click through several options and then set the flag. I'd love a "one touch" movelock feature to be added. Matter of fact, I'm gonna email them today to get that feature request in. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
