Reel-to-Reel tape service to be discontinued on December 15, 2009

Office of the Chief Information Officer Press Release
The University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia

Thursday, October 22, 2009

WRITER: Bert DeSimone, 706/338-9849, bert@uga.edu
CONTACT: Chris Flemming, 706-542-0189, cfleming@uga.edu

Reel-to-Reel magnetic tape service to be discontinued on December 15, 2009

ATHENS, Ga.— EITS will be discontinuing reel-to-reel magnetic tape service, which has been provided in the Boyd Data Center since the early 1970's.

The IBM 3420 Model 6 has been used since the early 70's for read/write operations for reel-to-reel magnetic tapes.

The device which reads data stored on these tapes (see photo) will be removed from the Boyd Data Center on December 15, 2009.

For several years, physical reel-to-reel tapes have been replaced by a virtual tape system from IBM. The virtual tape system stores the data on a hard disk located in the data center (eliminating the old tape vault that used to store thousands of tapes).

Reel-to-reel tapes containing data to be preserved must be converted to virtual tapes. If off-site backups are required, these should be created from the virtual tapes.

The Boyd Data Center staff are available to assist users who need to convert reel-to-reel tapes to virtual tapes. Please contact Chris Fleming, Boyd Data Center manager, for assistance: cfleming@uga.edu / 706-542-0189.

About the Office of the CIO and EITS
The Office of the Chief Information Officer and Enterprise Information Technology Services (EITS) are committed to the mission of UGA as a land-and-sea-grant institution where academics come first and the research extensive university community encourages research efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels. To that end, under the direction of the University's Chief Information Officer, EITS endeavors to provide a robust, reliable, and secure information technology infrastructure, maintain essential production services, and offer world-class support.

Search EITS