GPS Tracking For Buggy Whips
Some of you young “whipper-snappers” out there may not realize that there was once a significant industry in the US comprised of companies making horse whips and riding crops in all shapes and sizes. Week after week, years after year they just kept cranking out those whips. To them “innovation” was making the same size whip with less leather, or perhaps “designer colors” to appeal to the young singles among the buggy set.
Guys like Henry Ford, Charles and Frank Duryea., Ransom Olds and many others started producing these noisy, cantankerous and smelly “horseless carriages”, but nobody in the “real” industries of the day took much notice.
Got any buggy whips stock in your 401K portfolio? Hope not. But don’t be too sure.
When names like Control Data, Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General and Sperry/Univac where the blue chips of the computer industry a technology known as magnetic tape data storage came into its own. There were even hot companies like Storage Technology Corporation who made millions emulating just the magnetic storage devices … mainly tape … of the “big guys” and selling their product as better, faster, cheaper. If you travel in the circles that sometimes gets you access to the IT facilities of big corporations today you’ll often see magnetic tape “monsters” still grinding away. “making do” with the technology of the CIO’s fathers, simply because change is hard … just as very few buggy whip CEOs had enough foresight to get their product designers working on something 20th century.
OK, Dave, what has all this to do with GPS Tracking ROI? Fair question, and here’s what prompted me to take this trip down memory (no pun intended) lane:
Combination of Tape Media & GPS Technology Brings Data Managers Peace of Mind
Fuji Film today announced the Fuji film Tape Tracker, a unique, high performance data asset management solution that improves the security and shipping of data tape media. Designed to fit inside a standard tape media case, the Fuji film Tape Tracker combines leading GPS technology and a web-based application to provide CIOs and data managers with location and tracking information in real time… you can read the rest of this bitter-sweet story of trying to make last century’s technology modern here.
If you are a data center executive or planner you could do much worse than look into this clever use of GPS tracking technology. It certainly will make the task of keeping track of thousands of back-up and archival tapes more efficient and thus better, faster, cheaper.
But my own take on this is … why bother? magnetic disk storage (disk farms and Network Attached Storage (NAS)), optical disks and other media are so far advanced in comparison to magnetic tape that I am truly surprised to see a company with the abilities of Fuji expending the effort this “buggy whip” solution tool to build. If you are thinking of tracking magnetic tape storage media with GPS tracking you really need to step back a few paces and ask yourself “why”? (hint, take a look at your calendar and note what century we are currently living in).