Re: Anybody having experience with Dell LT2000 or LT4000 tape changer?

Thanks for the whole story Jon. I believe I'm in good hand with you around.

Do you see something I should take care of before buying one of these 2 tape library?

Here are some documentation about these:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_tl2000?c=uk&cs=RC1077915&s=pub&~tab=specstab
http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_tl4000?c=uk&cs=RC1077915&s=pub&~tab=specstab
http://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/stor%2Dsys/tl2k4k/en/ug/ug_en.pdf

Best regards,

Cyrille

Jon LaBadie <jon AT jgcomp DOT com>
Envoyé par : owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org

31/07/2007 17:04

Veuillez répondre à
amanda-users AT amanda DOT org

A	amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
cc
Objet	Re: Anybody having experience with Dell LT2000 or LT4000 tape changer?

On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 03:18:15PM +0200, Cyrille Bollu wrote: ... > > Also, can somebody explain me the main difference between a "tape library" > and a "tape autoloader"? Not sure if this is accurate or not - so take it with a grain of salt. Practically I think of them as differing in scale. A library might have 25, 50, 1000 tapes with robotic mechanisms selecting the tape and using potentially multiple drives in the same housing. I.e. the library is really separate from the drives, the drives just happen to be in the same cabinet. You can work with the library independent of the drives. Say for adding or removing tapes to the library. Autoloaders would be a single drive and changer mechanism as a unit. A common example is the HP SureStore DAT changers, of which I have one. The tape magazine hold 6 tapes and I've seen other brands that hold 4-10 tapes in the changer. Here the drive and the changer mechanism are integrated so you can't be doing tape I/O and changer operations at the same time. I suspect the term autoloaders come from the days when you could buy accessories to add to a drive and make it an autoloader. These attached to the front of the drive and held a few tapes. You will also see some mention in amanda of "gravity feed". These autoloaders held a stack of tapes (like old phonograph album changers). They were funny to look at. You had to put the drive at the front edge of the desk as there were ?chimneys? (my terminology) extending above and below the drive. The upper part of the chimney held the unused tapes, the middle was for the active tape (at the drives slot) and the bottom part of the chimney collected tapes as they were ejected. These gravity fed changers were one use only. I.e. once a tape was ejected by the drive and collected in the bottom, it had to be manually reloaded at the top to be used again. Maybe others have different definitions. jl -- Jon H. LaBadie jon AT jgcomp DOT com JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)