I will share what I know from users across about a dozen customer accounts:
- 3590 Magstar drives are the Cadillac/Mercedes of the tape subsystems; though you did not ask about this, I felt compelled to include it! - LTO technology is based on IBM's Magstar, but shared in collaboration with HP & Seagate; most customers have migrated up from DLT, so are (essentially) ecstatic about the speed and reliability of IBM's LTO! (note, IBM's LTO is what is considered to be the "Cadillac" of the LTO vendors, although I've heard good things about Dell's and HP's.) Price:capacity is attractive - for a reason; it's intended to compete with DLT (not high-end tape transports like 3590 or 9840/9940). - 9840's are the "old" (ie, outgoing) technology from STK; I would advise you to consider 9940A's, and maybe migrate to 9940B's -- that is the emerging, latest tape technology from STK -- while the jury is still out, initial experiences have been mostly positive (using SN6000 as a SAN-based conduit to a shared library, looks pretty nice, clean... so far). STK is highly motivated to make this work! Hope this helps! Don France Technical Architect -- Tivoli Certified Consultant Tivoli Storage Manager, WinNT/2K, AIX/Unix, OS/390 San Jose, Ca (408) 257-3037 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Professional Association of Contract Employees (P.A.C.E. -- www.pacepros.com) -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Joni Moyer Sent: Wednesday, July 24, 2002 12:18 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: LTO Tape OR 9840 Hello everyone! The environment here is going to be changing soon... We will be moving off of the mainframe and onto an AIX server that will be on our SAN. We will have 1 STK silo for the tapes for 2 TSM servers. Right now we are considering IBM's LTO or STK's 9840. I was just wondering if anyone out there has had experience with either one and if so, what are the pro's and con's of them? Has anyone that has worked with LTO know how long it takes to recover a bad tape? Considering that they are 100GB tapes, it was assumed that it would take 5 times as long as it does to recover a Magstar 3590(20 GB). And also, do the tapes get damaged easily or is that all a matter of handling them to take them offsite to vaults? Thank you!!!! Joni Moyer Associate Systems Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] (717)975-8338
