[Anonymous]

Fujifilm Adds GPS Tracker to Tape Cartridges
DEC
07:Fujifilm USA, the Valhalla, New York, subsidiary of Japanese film
and recording media giant Fujifilm, last week added a new twist to
technology for adding more security to tape archives.
The
techies at Fujifilm, who crank out more patentable pieces of
intellectual property than just about any other company in the world on
behalf of the $23.6 billion Japanese conglomerate, have come up with a
new product called Tape Tracker for data recording media. Fujifilm and
its tape drive partners have already added encryption to LTO Generation
4 tape drives, but once a tape leaves the data center, you start
feeling less secure. Particularly when we all read the papers and see
that companies–including IBM earlier this summer–have lost data tapes
in transit to archiving facilities, potentially allowing sensitive data
for millions of people to fall in the wrong hands.

To help put
CIOs, system administrators, and security officers at ease, Fujifilm
has been working with a security company called QinetiQ to put a global
positioning system (GPS) tracker inside of a standard 1/2-inch tape
cartridge. Having done this, the programmers at Fujifilm created a
Web-based tracking system that allows companies to actually see where
their tapes are as they are moving around the globe. One of the keys to
this Tape Tracker technology is an enhanced GPS receiver, which
Fujifilm says is over 1,000 times more sensitive than conventional
commercial receivers that you and I can buy at Wal-Mart. This means the
Fujifilm system can see tapes as they wind their way through cities,
rural areas, and even inside warehouses and data vaults. The Tape
Tracker system not only sees tapes when they are moving, but monitors
when they are at rest and are supposed to stay that way. If tapes start
moving when they are not supposed to, then the Tape Tracker system can
alert the right IT and security personnel.Tape Tracker is in beta
testing right now, and is scheduled to be generally available some time
in the first quarter of 2008

[Author]

December 4, 2007 at 11:24 AM