I have about 10 years of experience with Spectra libraries and we are a 
reseller of them so take my comments with the appropriate grains.

They are highly engineered libraries with tons of features.  In general they 
are very reliable and Spectra support is quite good.  I think Nick's comments 
reflect that as well.

We have a couple of T950s in the field and they have been good to us and our 
customers.  I have seen their brand new library (in fact I'm going to training 
tomorrow) and it is very nice.  I think that's the T-Finity line.  Very similar 
to the T950 but updated technology.

These guys are very committed to tape.

Steve, if you need more we can take this offline. I'm actually pretty objective 
when it comes to these guys.  Over Sun?  Take the Spectra every time.

Kelly Lipp
Chief Technology Officer
www.storserver.com
719-266-8777 x7105
STORServer solves your data backup challenges. 
Once and for all.

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Nick Laflamme
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 5:58 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] T950 Library experiences

On May 19, 2010, at 1:21 AM, Steven Harris wrote:

> Hi All
> 
> I'm looking at a Spectralogic T950 tape library instead of another Sun
> one to replace our aging Sun L700s
> 
> Has anyone good or bad stories to tell about this?  How does the
> user-replaceable spares offering work in practice? Are the tetrapaks
> robust or do they break easily?
> 
> Is configuration and partitioning simple and straightforward?

It's been a couple of years since I worked with one, but we used one as a 
remote tape library locked away in a wiring closet across campus. 

We didn't do any of our own servicing, and I don't think we partitioned the 
library at all, but the tetrapaks were just fine. 

We had a period when, as I recall, the library would start to experience 
intermittent hangs. Shortly before I left that employer, SpectraLogic flew 
someone out who determined that a good realignment would fix the problem; she 
was right. (That may have been related to us physically moving the library on 
our own from one wiring closet to another a couple of hundred yards away. I'm 
not saying it was, but I have to wonder.)

SpectraLogic was moving customers to SuperDAT drives to IBM LTO drives as I 
moved away from that shop. That's been more than two years; I presume they're 
stable on their drive choice now. 

Six months ago, when my current employer was getting ready to get off a 
particular virtual tape library technology, I would have been thrilled if we'd 
gone to T950s as our library type. I have good memories of the one I used. 
(Instead, we simply changed virtual tape library families, but that's for 
another day.)

It's hard to beat the density of a T950.

Good luck,
Nick