Control-T—An Automated Tape Management System Is Coming
As a part of DCRT's continuing automation effort, the Computing Facilities Branch (CFB) will implement a new tape management system, Control-T, later this summer. This product, from New Dimension Software, will provide many enhancements that will help manage the tape inventory of 165,000 tapes including:
The switch from the older, in-house tape- management system to the new Control-T product will be virtually transparent to users. Minor changes will be seen in two areas:
VOLSTAT is a utility that can be used to list the tapes assigned to a particular user; it can modify various fields in the tape media database, such as release date, status attributes, and title.
The functions will remain the same with one exception: "SET DENSITY" will no longer be available when Control-T is implemented later this summer. The tape density will, however, continue to be displayed.
Control-T maps the external, gummed label of the special tape to the correct internal volume label. This allows Control-T to support special tapes with volume serial numbers that match those in our tape library. In order to take full advantage of this function, we strongly encourage the use of your initials to identify special tapes—as in "iii001" where iii are your assigned initials. In the future all special tapes may be required to have assigned external serial numbers of this format.
To provide better functionality for Control-T, users should begin to catalog their tape data sets now. The NIH Computer Center User's Guide provides information on cataloging data sets (e.g., naming conventions).
To take full advantage of all the features available in Control-T and provide software system compatibility, additional changes may be required in the future. We will keep you abreast of these changes as they are needed and make the transition as smooth as possible.
Interface 196 (June 15, 1996)