Protect Your Data Assets

Recently DSI has introduced its virtual tape library products into the OS 2200 market.  With
virtual tape, operations managers and application users achieve even greater levels of productivity. 
FCI has enhanced STAR-1100 to extend its comprehensive protection and management features
for physical and virtual tape volumes.

For nearly three decades, STAR-1100 has been protecting crucial data stored on magnetic tapes
in Unisys OS 2200 data centers around the world. Continuously keeping pace with changing trends
in enterprise operations, STAR-1100 helps management protect their data assets while making
tape operations more cost-effective, and provides extensive reporting with detailed and summary
information about tape use. 

User programs and utilities access the virtual tape volumes much the same as physical volumes,
and therefore, the virtual tape volumes also need protection against inadvertent overwriting.  In
STAR 8R1, FCI generalized the scratch tape selection process to support external applications
calling STAR to access scratch volumes.

In order to implement a virtual tape solution under OS 2200, users need a device management
function to differentiate between an allocation for a physical tape versus a request for a virtual
tape.  FCI has introduced STAR Library Manager, which enables the attachment of DSI Virtual Tape
Libraries to an OS 2200 system.  STAR Library Manager detects user requests for virtual tapes
and drives and routes those mount and dismount requests to the appropriate DSI Virtual Tape Library. 
It also takes advantage of STAR-1100’s scratch selector service to use scratch pools belonging to
the appropriate virtual tape library.  STAR Library Manager is tightly integrated with STAR-1100. 
For additional information about STAR Library Manager, see the page on that topic.

STAR-1100 is a proprietary product of Formula Consultants Inc.  For more information on STAR-1100,
see its product specification.