NEVER had to run in manual mode??? Never had the robotic fail???

        You must be a lucky person, perhaps you should by a lottery
ticket this week. ;-)

        We have had 4 3494 tape libraries  for about 9 years. During
that time, we have had probably a dozen mechanical failures on the
robotics & had 4 times when we had to run in Manual mode because the
library was down for an extended period. Not ~too~ bad, considering that
is across 4 libraries I guess.

        The last failure we had (last month), was the failure of an
"Arctic" card in the PC in the library. That made it so the library
would not even boot up so we couldn't even put it in manual mode. I
attempted to reconfigure the library and devices on the TSM server to
use them as manual devices, but couldn't get that to work because TSM
would not let me change/delete/reconfigure the devicetypes because they
were defined to Storagepools with data in them.
        Of course the card was not in stock in town and the library was
down 27 hours while we waited for it to be flown in. The diskpools
filled up, and backups failed till we got the library back up.

        I know some of you are thinking that I should have been able to
use the drives in a manual mode, and so did I at the time. But try as I
might, I couldn't get them to define in and change my STGPOOL
configurations to use the manual devices.

Ben


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
David Bronder
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:19 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Re: 3494/3584 HA1 High Availability Option - is it worth
it?

Like Wanda and Bob, we've had our 3494 for coming up on 7 years now.
In that time, though, we've never had a robot failure, nor have we had
to run in manual mode.

We have the dual-gripper option, though, and that's saved us several
times when we've had gripper failures.  For example, the time the
gripper was flinging tapes around inside the library.  The bad gripper
had to be manually disabled since the LM thought it was fine.  But the
second gripper kept us in automated mode.

Another reason for the HA1 option, though, is performance.  If you have
a really large 3494 (pushing 16 frames), dual robots apparently can be a
big boost to mount service times.  Or so says the IBM tape Top Gun who
was here over the weekend helping us expand our 3494.  Fortunately, our
library isn't that big (and I don't expect it to ever get that big).

=Dave

Prather, Wanda wrote:
>
> Ditto.
> Our 3494 is 7 years old now.
> Same experience with failures (1-2 a year).
> Same experience waiting for the plane to arrive with parts!
> We also just put it in manual mode and tough it out until the repairs 
> are done.


--
Hello World.                                    David Bronder - Systems
Admin
Segmentation Fault                                     ITS-SPA, Univ. of
Iowa
Core dumped, disk trashed, quota filled, soda warm.
david-bronder AT uiowa DOT edu