got a question for the sysadmins

[DAVID KUCHARSKI]

Recently had to rebuild from a drive failure in a SCO Unix box.  In the 
last few weeks I've learned a bunch about how my tape drive works with 
SCO.  In the process I added a NEW VXA tape drive to a LINUX box as 
well.  I found that the SCO box uses a command called tape to CONTROL 
the drive.  I can use
#tape rewind or #tape amount etc to get all kinds of things to happen 
regarding the scsi tape drive.

is there something similar in linux? I've tried tape with no luck.  Is 
that an option that i'll need to add or what would anyone suggest.  If 
I'm going to NEED to add something anyway, might as well get your 
opinions now.  Something simple to use in case i die  and have to depend 
on one of the non-technical people here to read written instructions  to 
get a back up or recover from another fatal drive error.
Thanks
Dave
The system is running REDHAT 7.1
in case that matters.