I've got a lot to say today, I guess. I am the proud parent of a bouncing baby 3584-S24 frame. That's one of the new "high-density" frames, with tape slots that are four (or in the LTO case, 5) tapes deep. This means that I've got 1000 slots in the floorspace which used to hold 400. For you LTO types, it's 440->1320.
The device is quite neat, and I think that any of you whose libraries are not usually waiting on the gripper as a bottleneck in your systems might want to consider at least one of them. The basic idea is that, on the "back" wall (not the door) in the volume taken up by drives and stuff in the D frames, there are springloaded slots which can hold several tapes. The gripper plays Towers Of Hanoi with them to get the tape you want. There are several rows of tape slots at the top (and bottom??) which are marked with 'construction' / 'caution' yellow and black stripes, which I understand implies you're not to manually stick tapes there. When you insert a bunch of tapes in the frame, you get this funky double-tap behavior out of the gripper. It moves to the top (for example) of a row, with the two dont-touch-me cells above it, + Scan top two tapes (i.e. first cell and second cell down) + Grab top two tapes (revealing the second on each shelf) + Insert top two tapes into construction zone It does this four times, (or maybe fewer if you've got less than four tapes in each slot). At this point, it's generated two -new- empty cells in the top and second cell. So, it moves down two, and does the same thing again. At the end of the inventory process, every tape has been shuffled and is two slots up from where it was. Of course, it's totally scrambled the physical element addresses; for this reason you have to buy the "ALMS" feature code, which puts an abstraction layer between the virtual element address and the physical. As a bonus, this means that the library can gradually churn your volumes so that the more frequently used ones stay on the one-deep slots, and the rarely used one shuffle to the back. It's my guess that for sites with a normal distribution of tape mounts, this will result in not-much average increase in tape delay. If you get ALMS up and running before you get started with the physical install, it'll smooth the path for your SE. If you get your microcode up to the very latest too, it'll make his life even easier. - Allen S. Rout
