Hi, I am considering replacement for my Amanda server, the guy has been in production for about 6 years now and I want to be ready for the time when the tape drive will die.
We currently use SLR100, wich is fine, very little tape failure, but tapes are expensive, a 50 GB (native) 100 GB (compressed) tape is the price of a 250 GB hard disk. The tape drive itself cost twice the price of the server at that time. So we are considering vtapes, but I would like to have hard disk physical rotation, the same way we have tape rotation --and it is manual changing of the tape every day. The only answer I don't have concernes the hardware to use for disk hot plug mounting and unmounting (on the software side,I now thatthe disk can be disconnected from the operating system before they are physically removed from the machine). Normal hot swap bay for hard disk are not designed for daily use, they are designed for maintenance only, and would break soon if I swaped the disk every day. Could anyone advise on some disk tray solution that is stong and reliable and will handle a lot of manipulation. idealy I wouldbe looking at one tray bay and 5 or 6 trays for the disks. best regards, Olivier
