We're trying to come up with LTO-4 tape libraries to put in our remote datacenter locations. The "plan" is for us to have Iron Mountain come out every week, pick up tapes that are sitting in mail slots waiting for them, leave a like number of blanks behind, and life is good.
I know, for instance, that the Quantum i500 (aka IBM's TS6601, Dell's ML6000) will do this. It's got a nice 6-slot "mail door" that is basically locked only when the picker is moving stuff around, so Iron Mountain can show up, do their business, and leave. The i500, however, is (potentially) a bit "big" for us. We're an HP shop, so we started looking at things like the MSL2024, which says it has "3 mail slots", however, those mail slots are in a magazine, not their own separate "access point" so to speak. Most tape backup software ends up locking the magazines specifically so that the inventory can't change without the software knowing about it. What this would mean is that we would have to coordinate with Iron Mountain, unlocking the library when they showed up, re-locking and re- inventorying it after they left, which would be kind of a hassle. We initially looked at a compromise solution which would be the SpectraLogic T50e, where it has queued ejects, so the Iron Mountain guy could show up and it would just spew out all the tapes that were waiting for him, but (apparently) reloading via this interface is somewhat sucky (so we were told). I suppose we could arrange to have Iron Mountain JUST do the unloads, and pay the colocation staff onsite to do reloads as needed if we had to. Does anyone else have suggestions for products they've seen which might fit the bill, but come in somewhat more cost-effectively than the i500 does? Cheers, D _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
