The present invention relates to document and media storage and in particular large scale storage requiring periodic reallocation of storage capabilities.
Both open slot storage and container storage are commonly utilized to store documents and media at offsite vaults. Open slot storage generally comprises vertical drawers individually horizontally drawn from a common cabinet and is commonly used for storing media such as data tapes and disks. The vertical drawers are configurable to allow creation of vertically spaced apart shelves holding rows of common sized media (e.g. tape or disk) containers and the media is accessible by horizontally drawing the drawer containing the media from the cabinet. U.S. Pat. No. 4,657,317 discloses a very efficient open slot storage unit manufactured by Russ Bassett, Corp. in Whittier, Calif. under the trademark Gemtrac™. The '317 patent is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Container storage includes vertically spaced apart horizontal shelves for containers. The containers hold multiple media, for example, tapes, typically 20-40 per container. Known container storage is constructed using common pallet racks as a frame. Unfortunately, the cabinets of open slot storage are very different from the pallet racking used to support container storage and share no common structure. For example, the vertically spaced apart horizontal shelves required for known container storage are not compatible with the full height vertical drawers of the open slot storage systems. Both storage systems require major installation expenditure decisions made years in advance as to the mix of open slot or case storage which will be needed in the future. When storage needs change, costs of converting from one to another are prohibitive, resulting in inefficient use of storage space.
A need thus exists for storage allowing convenient conversion between open slot and container storage.