John Kapturowski wrote:
>
> Here is the background information on our system:
> - 3494 Magstar Robotic tape library with 3590 B drives

You don't say whether you'll be upgrading your tape drives when you add
3590K cartridges into the mix.  The original 3590 B drives don't support
3590K cartridges (aka, "extended length").  I don't recall whether they
offered an extended length upgrade for the model B drives that didn't
involve converting them to model E or model H drives.

But make sure you either have drives that support the "K" tapes or are
upgrading your drives so they will be able to support "K" tapes.  If the
drives have a green "2x" sticker on the back, you _should_ be good, but
you might want to double-check with your support engineer.  (The green
sticker matches the green tabs and leader block on the "K" tapes.)

Upgrading to model E or model H involves changing the number of tracks
written on a tape.  If you do a model upgrade, you'll have to change all
of your non-empty cartridges to read-only and, after the drive upgrade,
migrate all the data to empty cartridges.  You can still use your "J"
tapes (and get higher capacity on them, too), but the drives can only
write at their newer track density.  This is covered in a number of TSM
server device README documents.

Good luck with your growth!

=Dave

--
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