[BBLISA] Tape drives?

[John Stoffel]

Scott> I'm pricing tape drives for high reliability.  

Are you pricing just drives, or robotics as well?  It's not clear from
your request, though all the replies seem to assume it.

Scott> What vendor and what type do more people trust - Quantum or
Scott> Dell, or someone else?  Also, SDLT or LTO?  Price is not so
Scott> much an issue as is reliability.  I aim for rack mount, but
Scott> that isn't so important if a suitable tape drive comes along
Scott> that simply hangs off the server.

I've been reasonably happy with my Quantum support, though the
libraries and drives haven't been great.  We're currently using SDLT
320s and if you keep them cleaned, and feed them data fast enough,
they're fine.

Shoe-shining tape drives kills them, so make sure you can feed data
fast enough.  Heck, for my home DLT7k, just staging to disk then to
tape has made a huge difference in tape usage and in terms of how
often it whines at me with the shoe-shining sounds.  And it's faster
too.  :] 

For my previous job with had gotten an ADIC i2k library with six LTO-2
drives.  I think they were IBM and we certainly had to up the firmware
a couple of times.  But while I was there, they were trouble free.  

Scott> Also, what brand/manufacturer tapes have people found most
Scott> reliable?

Haven't really paid attention to media brands lately, someone else
buys it.  Just get the middle priced media and you should be all set.
Don't get the cheapest.  :]

Scott> This will be for 4 dual-boot (XP and CentOS 5) systems
Scott> connecting to a PowerEdge server.  I'm awaiting details on
Scott> exactly how much storage we are actually going to be dealing
Scott> with, and if the data will be static or dynamic.

Get a smaller tape library and put it behind a large cheap disk
storage farm so you can do D2D2T and you'll be happier, much happier.
Esp if/when a tape drive dies, it won't kill all your backups if you
have enough disk for a full dump plus some incrementals.

John