If you are worried about the reliability of your tape drives and cartridges, a new product from Imation, called StorSentry, should interest you. StorSentry was initially developed by HiStor, a French software company that entered a partnership with Imation earlier this year. Using collection agents installed at strategic points in your network, typically on every backup server or media server, StorSentry records If you are worried about the reliability of your tape drives and cartridges, a new product from Imation, called StorSentry, should interest you. StorSentry was initially developed by HiStor, a French software company that entered a partnership with Imation earlier this year.Using collection agentsinstalled at strategic points in your network, typically on every backup server or media server, StorSentry records performance data about every read and write to tape devices and media and stores that information in a dedicated database. A powerful reporting application helps you sift that data, allowing you to determine the frequency of use, the amount of data stored, and the errors registered for each backup device.It’s important to understand that StorSentry doesn’t monitor the success or failure of backup or restore jobs. If that is your main concern you should look at other solutions, such as one from Bocada, for example.What StorSentry does, and judging from a demo I have seen, does rather well, is to pinpoint how heavily each piece of hardware has been used and how well it is performing. For example, you can find out how many times each drive has been used, how much data was written or read on that device, and the transfer rate for each execution. A quite useful feature is the ability to set thresholds that trigger certain alerts, such as when a tape should be cleaned. StorSentry has default values for each criteria, but allows you to override those to generate early warnings if you like. Tape drives and tape media are typically the most failure-prone objects in a data center, and we all know that the question is not “if” but “when” they will eventually show errors. Digging deeper into each tape drive’s history, you can get more granular data, such as the number of mounts and how many bytes were read or written at each session. If you ever need to contact the tape vendor, the Profile Windowgroups all the pertinent information, including the make, model, and serial number of the unit and the version of firmware it is running.Selecting a cartridge will bring up a similar abundance of information that you can use to monitor errors and spot degraded performance.Some proprietary solutions from tape vendors (Quantum DLTSage, for example) offer some of the same capabilities, but none I know of comes even close to the powerful and flexible reporting and the extensive data collection that I saw in the StorSentry demo. Imation StorSentry Availability: Now Pricing: Pricing for StorSentry is calculated based on three components; the operating system environment, the number of tape drives to be monitored and the media pool to be monitored. Verdict: For companies that manage hundreds of tape drives, StorSentry can bring much-needed control over how frequently they are used. It won’t make drives or reels more reliable, but offers the tools to predict and perhaps avoid catastrophic read failures. Technology Industry