VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature

The VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature license provides the capability to track media movement between several locations. In addition to the standard VaultTracker^® features, it also provides several advanced capabilities. The following sections describe the features and capabilities specific to the VaultTracker Enterprise Feature.

The VaultTracker license provides the capability to track media movement between two locations. It is also used to export media. For information on the specific VaultTracker features and capabilities, see VaultTracker Feature.

For information on license requirements, see VaultTracker^® Licenses in License Administration.

Managing Media

The VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature provides the facility to manage media that are removed from a library and stored in offsite locations. In practical terms, VaultTracker Enterprise feature provides the following capabilities in your day-to-day operations:

Identifies media that must be sent off-site for storage or brought back from off site locations.
Automatically moves the media in sequence in the library and provides a pick-up list for the operators.
Facility to identify and track media during transit.
Facility to record and track containers when the media is stored and moved using containers.
Facility to record and track the movement of media not used by all MediaAgents or Foreign Media.

The following diagram provides an overview of VaultTracker Enterprise Feature:

How to Use The VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature

The following section describes the possible steps involved in tracking media using VaultTracker^® Enterprise:

Initiate the VaultTracker feature process by exporting the media using VaultTracker enterprise feature.
- For media that should be exported immediately, you can export the media from a list of available media with the VaultTracker feature enabled.
- For media that should be exported once certain criteria are met, you can define one or more Tracking Policies.
  A Standard Tracking Policy can track the movement of media between any source and destination.
  
  A Due Back policy can track the movement of spare media residing in an off-site location.
- For media that should be exported at the completion of a data protection or auxiliary copy operation, you can configure the operation to export the media using the VaultTracker feature once the operation has completed.
Once the Export Media operation has been initiated, you can remove the media from the library. Qualifying media can either be ejected from the library's mail-slot or can be sorted into virtual mail slots that are defined in the library, so that these media can be easily removed by opening the library door.
If media is moved to an off-site location, containers can be created.
While the media is in transit, you can track and acknowledge the status of the media using Pending Actions.
- Use Manual Acknowledgement to track the media manually in the CommCell^® Browser.
- Use Automatic Acknowledgement to automatically acknowledge all pending actions associated with the media as long as the source and destination are locations.
Create one or more alerts to provide notification of movement actions as they are completed.
If an exported media is needed for a data recovery operation, the media can be recalled using the Recall Media feature. See Recall Media for more information on recalling media.
Iron Mountain customers can generate the necessary reports in the appropriate format and either directly mail them out on a scheduled basis or save them to a target location.
View information about the media managed by VaultTracker Enterprise feature by generating a Tracking Report, which can include pending actions, spare media that are due back, and media associated with a Tracking Policy.

The following sections describe each of these possible steps in depth.

Exporting Media using VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature

You can export media using the VaultTracker Feature software and VaultTracker Enterprise Feature in the following ways:

using the Export Media Wizard
using the Export Media from a List feature
using VaultTracker Policies
after Data Protection and Auxiliary Copy Operations (VaultTracker Enterprise Feature only)

All three methods provide the necessary options to run the export operation immediately or schedule the export operation to run for a later time.

You can configure the number of times an export operation must retry before it is aborted, and the retry interval minutes using the Export Operation Retry Count and the VaultTracker feature export retry interval in minutes options from the Media Management Configuration (Service Configuration) dialog box available in the Control Panel.

The following sections discuss the various export media options in depth.

Exporting Media using the Export Media Wizard

The Export Media Wizard provides the capability to quickly export one or more media from a library. This wizard is useful if you know the library containing the media you wish to export, as well as the media to be exported. You can choose to export media in 2 ways:

using the VaultTracker/VaultTracker Enterprise feature, which provides all the options you need create tracking policies.
from a list of available media in the library, from which you can select the appropriate media to be exported. The media will then be automatically placed in the appropriate mail slot for removal.

The Export Media Wizard is accessible at the Library and Media in Library levels in the CommCell^® Console. See Export Media using the Export Media Wizard for step-by-step instructions.

Exporting Media from a List

Media can be selected from a list of media and exported. This is useful when you wish to export several media at the same time and know either the media’s barcode, or slot number in which the media resides. This task can be performed from the following levels in the CommCell^® Console:

Media List dialog box which appears when you select the View Media option. This dialog box can be accessed by right-clicking a Storage Policy copy.
Media List dialog box which appears when you select the Change Data Path option. This dialog box can be accessed by right-clicking a Storage Policy copy.
Media List dialog box which appears when you select the Media Not Copied option. This dialog box can be accessed by right-clicking a Storage Policy and Storage Policy copy.

Once the media to be exported is selected, you can choose to use the VaultTracker feature to track the export operation by clicking on the Advanced button in the Export Media List dialog box. A Tracking policy can be created to export media based on the selected criteria.

See Export Media from a List using VaultTracker Feature for step-by-step instructions.

Exporting Media using Tracking Policies

Tracking Policies help you to define what media must be moved, where it must be moved to, and when it should be moved. This is useful if you wish to schedule routine exports of media that have satisfied certain criteria.

Tracking Policies can be used to track regular media movements, such as when media is shipped from a library to off-site storage, media repository, or shipment of media between 2 locations, etc. Once a policy is created, you can view the media associated with that policy by right-clicking on the policy and selecting View Media.

Two types of tracking policies are available, described below, which are created using the VaultTracker Enterprise Policy Wizard.

Standard Policies	A standard policy can be created to track the movement of media between any source and any destination, including: Library to location Location to location Location to library Library to library
Due Back Policies	A Due Back policy can be created to track the movement of spare media stored in an off-site location.

When creating a policy, you can:

Schedule the policy to run at a later time if you anticipate changes being made to the policy prior to media movement taking place. Policies can be scheduled to run daily, weekly, etc., if desired.
Delay the export of the media, which creates a time gap between when the policy is run and when the media movement actions actually start. This provides time for you to create and review a Vault Tracking Report with all the policy's actions detailed prior to any actions taking place. If any changes to the policy are required, you can perform these changes without aborting or rerunning an action.
Temporarily stop an action by placing the export operation in a pending state for a specified amount of time. This is useful if you need to perform library maintenance or urgent data protection and recovery operations, but do not wish to abort or restart what has already been completed. You can manually restart the policy from the point it left off when the library is available, or you can set the policy to resume automatically at a specific time.

Once created, you can further facilitate Tracking Policies by right-clicking on the policy in the CommCell^® Console:

Run the policy if you wish to initiate the policy without further delays or changes to the policy.

Clone the policy to create an exact duplicate of the policy that retains all of the properties of the original policy. Once created, you can edit the properties of the policy, if necessary. This saves you the time of creating a new policy manually. (See Cloning Policies for more information.)
Change the Properties of a policy if you wish to make changes to the configuration of the policy while it is still in the pending state.

For step-by-step instructions on creating and managing tracking policies, see the following:

Exporting Media After Data Protection and Auxiliary Copy Operations

A media movement can also be triggered by a Data Protection or Auxiliary Copy operation, either scheduled, or performed immediately. Once the operation succeeds, the media movement operation will be triggered. These options are useful when media associated with a specific job has to be sent offsite, then the Data Protection or Auxiliary Copy schedule can be marked accordingly so that an action can be directly initiated upon successful completion of the job.

If media associated with a specific job has to be sent offsite, then the Data Protection or Auxiliary Copy schedule can be marked accordingly so that an action can be directly initiated upon successful completion of the job.

For step-by-step instructions, see the following:

See Also: Export Media

Removing Media from the Library

Once the export operation has been initialized, the media can then be removed from the library in the following ways:

Use the virtual mail slot option to store the media in contiguous slots in the library, so that it can be easily removed by opening the library door.
Can be ejected using the library mail slots.

Virtual Mail Slots

Virtual mail slots are a range of contiguous slots in the library that are used to store media that are to be moved out. Virtual mail slots provide the facility to open the library door and pick up the media to be moved from a pre-determined range of slots.

Virtual mail slots in a library can be defined from the Library Properties dialog box. You must also specify whether VaultTracker^® Enterprise must use the virtual mail slot in the Tracking Policy, Data Protection, Auxiliary Copy or Export Media operations.

Media moved to the virtual mail slots are marked as Exportable. An option to use the media in virtual mail slots for data protection operations, is also provided in the Library Properties dialog box.

Virtual mail slots are not supported for IP-based libraries, such as libraries attached to an ACSLS Server, ADIC libraries attached to SDLC, etc.

Library Mail Slots

If you do not setup the virtual mail slots in the library, the media will be automatically exported using the library's mail slots.

Moving Media Using Containers

When containers are used to ship out media, the container information can be added as an additional attribute of the media information. This information will be useful to identify the container in which the media is located when the media is recalled.

When the capacity of a container has been reached, any remaining media is automatically carried over to the next available container defined in the Tracking Policy.

Creating Containers

Containers can be created using the following methods:

Containers can be automatically created from a Tracking Policy, using an automated mechanism to generate the container names. If this is established, a container will be automatically created whenever the Tracking Policy is run and all the location for all the media associated with the job will be automatically set to the associated container.
See Establish Automatic Container Generation in a Tracking Policy for step-by-step instructions.
Containers can also be manually created from the CommCell^® Browser by right-clicking the Containers icon, under VaultTracker, and then clicking New Container.
See Add/Modify a Container for step-by-step instructions.

Once the container is created, you can Move, Remove, Delete, and Recall all media associated with that container by right-clicking on the container in the CommCell Browser and selecting the desired option. You can also view/edit the container's Properties.

Associating Container Information to the Media

For media that are not automatically associated with a container, (as explained in the preceding sections), there are several ways of associating the container information. They are:

When you record the Pending Action as Reached Destination, you will be provided with the option to set a container if necessary.
You can set the container for any Pending Action that are displayed in the right-pane of the CommCell^® Browser, when you click the Actions icon under VaultTracker.
Containers can also be associated with media displayed in the Exported Media pool. This can be done in two ways:
- You can individually associate a container for a specific media by opening and Media Properties and selecting a container as the location for the media.
- Set the container for all media in the Exported Media pool, by right-clicking the Exported Media icon displayed under Media By Location and then clicking the Set Container option.

See Add Media to a Container for step-by-step instructions.

Locating the Container Associated with a Media

The contents of a container can be viewed using the View Media option associated with the container in the CommCell Console. See Display the Media available in a Container for step-by-step instructions.

You can also generate a Tracking Report or Media Information report as appropriate. The container associated with the specific media is displayed in these reports.

Pruning Container Information

VaultTracker^® Enterprise prunes empty container details based on the number of days established in the Container cleanup interval days option from the Media Management Configuration (Service Configuration) dialog box available in the Control Panel.

Container information can also be manually deleted from the policy when the container is no longer needed. See Delete Container Information for step-by-step instructions.

Setting Container Information using Barcodes

The setMediaLocation utility, which can be obtained from the software Resource Pack, allows you to set container information for media using the media's barcode. This is useful if you wish to incorporate existing barcode scanning capabilities with media movement operations performed with VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature. See Resource Pack for more information.

Recording Pending Actions

Once media is removed from the library, all media movement outside the library must be recorded to track the operation. Such outside media movements are referred to as Pending Actions. Once an action is initiated, the media will be displayed in the reconciliation report.

The following list provides links to diagrams that depict the various types of media movements and the options provided for recording pending actions:

The following pending actions can be recorded:

Picked up - This option should be used to set the media location as In Transit, when the source is a location. (In the case of a library, this option will be automatically performed when the media is removed from the source library.)
Reached Destination - This option should be used to indicate that the media has reached its destination. The pending action is considered to be completed and the pending action information is displayed in the Tracking History. If the final destination is a library, this option will be automatically performed when the media is detected in the destination library.
Return to Source - This option should be used to reset media location to the source location. This option is valid only when:
- The media is in the in-transit state.
- When the source is a location. (not a library)
Abort - Aborts the pending action.
Suspend - Temporarily discontinues all media movement for a specified amount of time. The media movement can be resumed manually or at a specified time.
Resume - Media movement continues when a suspension has been lifted by either manually resuming the action or when the specified Suspend time has expired.
Set Container - Assign a specific container to the selected policy.
Recall Media - Media that is being brought back to the source location for a specific task, such as a data recovery operation.
Quit Time - Specify the amount of time to elapse for the action to abort. This is also configurable in the Media Management Configuration (Service Configuration) dialog box.

The diagram on the right provides a summary of all pending actions.

You can view the pending actions in the CommCell^® Browser by right-clicking the VaultTracker icon under the Storage Resources icon, and then clicking Actions. All pending actions are displayed on the right-hand pane.

Acknowledging Pending Actions

VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature provides two ways of acknowledging pending actions:

Manual Acknowledgement
Automatic Acknowledgement

These are explained in the following sections.

Manual Acknowledgment

When you run a data protection operation, auxiliary copy operation, Export Media operation, or Tracking Policy with the auto-acknowledge option disabled, you must manually acknowledge the media movement actions. You can record the pending action either for all media associated with a specific movement, or for individual media associated with a specific movement.

There are two methods with which you can manually acknowledge pending actions:

Pre-acknowledge: All pending actions can be acknowledged assuming that the tapes will get to the destination.
You can then generate a Media Information report, which sorts the media based on the export location. This report can then be sent to an offsite person/agency to verify that the contents matches the information in VaultTracker^® Enterprise.
Post-acknowledge: The Tracking Report with the Reconciliation option enabled can be generated. All media which are in transit are listed. Once a confirmation from offsite is received, all Pending Actions can be acknowledged.

See Monitor and Record the Status of a Media for step-by-step instructions.

Automatic Acknowledgment

When you create a Tracking Policy, you can enable the Auto-Acknowledge option within the policy. When such a policy is run, the system will automatically acknowledge all pending actions associated with the media movement if both source and destination is a location. If the source is a library, the pending actions will be automatically acknowledged when the media is removed from the library.

Note that the automatic acknowledgement option can be enabled (or disabled) for a Tracking Policy and Media Export operations. Automatic acknowledgement is not available for Data Protection and Auxiliary copy operations.

See Set Automatic Tracking in a VaultTracker Policy for step-by-step instructions.

Viewing Tracking History

Once all the pending actions are recorded, the VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature automatically catalogs the information in the Tracking History. VaultTracker^® Enterprise history can be viewed from the CommCell^® Browser by right-clicking the Actions icon under VaultTracker, and then clicking View History. Filter options for viewing the history are also provided.

If you would like the information to be displayed in the Actions pane before it is moved to the history information, you can establish a display time using the Time in hours to show the vault tracker history in actions pane option from the Media Management Configuration (Service Configuration) dialog box available in the Control Panel.

See View the Tracking History for step-by-step instructions:

Rolling back an action

The Roll Back option can be performed if both the source and destination locations were export locations and the media is listed in the history information after being marked as reached destination. This option provides the opportunity to rollback a wrong location change.

See Roll Back an Action in the Tracking History for step-by-step instructions.

Deleting an action

You can Delete a pending action history or delete individual media action history of a pending action.

See Delete an Action in the Tracking History for step-by-step instructions.

Pruning Tracking History

Tracking History information is by default pruned after 90 days. If necessary this value can be modified using the Days to keep VaultTracker records option from the Media Management Configuration (Vault Tracker Configuration) dialog box available in the Control Panel.

Managing Media Repository

Media Repository provides a way of keeping track and managing media that are stored in outside storage locations. For example, Media Repository provides the facility to manage spare and new media, foreign media or media not used by the MediaAgents in this CommCell^® group, expired media, etc. that reside outside the libraries.

A media repository can be created from the CommCell Browser by right-clicking the Media Repository icon, under VaultTracker, and then clicking Add Shelf. When you create a shelf in a media repository, the various Media Groups are automatically created by default. If necessary you can add additional media groups to the shelf. You must assign a default media type for the various groups within the media repository. You can then add media available in the media repository, using either specific barcodes or a range of barcodes as appropriate.

Note that a Media Repository can be specified as the target location when media is tracked from VaultTracker^® Enterprise.

See the following for step-by-step instructions:

Recording Locations

An option to add all locations, including stationary and transit locations has been provided. This includes the facility to modify or delete existing locations.

See the following for step-by-step instructions:

Setting Location Information using Barcodes

The setMediaLocation utility, which can be obtained from the software Resource Pack, allows you to set location information for media using the media's barcode. This is useful if you wish to incorporate existing barcode scanning capabilities with media movement operations performed with VaultTracker^® Enterprise. See Resource Pack for more information.

Alerts

Several alerts can be configured where necessary. For a detailed description of these alerts, see Media Management in Alerts and Monitoring.

Additionally, you can configure alerts for Recall Media operations. See Alerts Configuration in Recall Media for more information.

See Configure Global Alerts for step-by-step instructions on creating alerts.

A time interval for generating VaultTracker^® alerts can be established using the Interval (Minutes) between VaultTracker^® alerts option from the Media Management Configuration (Service Configuration) dialog box available in the Control Panel.

Recall Media

The Recall Media feature provides the facility to temporarily bring media back from an export location for a specific operation and return the media to the export location when the operation is complete. This capability is useful if you have exported media to another location with the intention of keeping the media at the export location for an established period of time, but need to bring the media back from the export location for a specific purpose (such as a data recovery operation) prior to the original return date.

See Recall Media for more information.

Recording the Iron Mountain Customer Identification Number

You can record the unique Iron Mountain Customer Identification numbers for each Iron Mountain account provided to your enterprise. These numbers will be used by the CommServe to generate the reports that are requested in the Iron Mountain format.

See Add or Modify the Customer Identification Number for step-by-step instructions.

License Requirements

For information on license requirements, see VaultTracker^® Licenses in License Administration.

Related Reports

Vault Tracking Report

The Vault Tracking Report can be generated to view information about media managed by the VaultTracker^® feature, including pending actions, spare media that are due back, movement action history, and media related to a VaultTracker policy. Each Vault Tracking Report can be generated and saved in HTML, text, and Iron Mountain Report formats. Optionally, a style sheet can be selected to customize the XML output.

The Reconciliation option, if selected, will display all the tapes that are pending their arrival at the destination.

If the Due Back option is selected, the Tracking Report will display all spare media or media that will become spare media. The tracking report can be used without initiating actual actions. An option to filter media based on time range, storage policies and estimated retention time is also available.

For information on generating and using the Vault Tracking Report, see Vault Tracking Report.

Media Information Report

The Media Information report can be generated by sorting the media based on the export location. This report can then be sent to an offsite person/agency to verify that the contents matches the information in the VaultTracker^® feature.

Registry Keys Use Cases

Use the following registry keys to modify the default behavior for the VaultTracker^® feature:

Registry Key(s)	Description
VaultTrackerExportDelayTime	This registry key introduces a delay time for scheduling a reconciliation report.
VaultTrackerExportQuitTime	This registry key forces the export of media to end after a certain amount of time.
nKeepVTHistoryWithActionsForHours	This registry key allows you to keep actions in the Media Action Details window for 15 minutes by default (time is configurable in this key).

VaultTracker® Enterprise Feature

Library Mail Slots

Vault Tracking Report

Media Information Report

VaultTracker^® Enterprise Feature