Simple tape management system

A compact, interactive tape management system is described. It is fast, requires no commercial software, and includes a user-friendly human interface. The CASPUR tape management system (TMS) was designed for relatively small (up to several tens of thousands tapes) tape pools. The main design principle was simplicity: no sophisticated database tools or systems are used; instead, the TMS server keeps all the information in plain text file. This design decision could have led to difficulties, such as those that could be encountered if one needs to change/introduce some fields in the database. However, this difficulty does not occur with the CASPUR TMS because all the data fields are well defined from the very beginning.<
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