The T9940B drives I last installed were rated at writing 200GB to a
cartridge (not counting compression).  That gets you to less fifty cents per
GigaByte!

As for tape drive speed, if you are going to work with those theoretical
upper limits, you'd better have high speed HBA's in a media server with lots
of physical memory for buffering.  Better yet, make sure those HBA's are
spread across the internal busses which connect into the machine's backplane
or you'll be saturating them...  Getting non-local data into the media
server at those speeds requires switched gigabit for sure; where are you
going to put all those NICs?

What I am trying to tell you is that there is lot more to looking at drive
cost to look at when building these environments.  At the prices STK charges
for its T9940 drives, you can pop for a few cheaper drives and another media
server license on a second machine!

www.pbnj-solutions.com IT Solutions That Stick
(216) 533-5708


> -----Original Message-----
> From: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu 
> [mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of 
> Brian Chase
> Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2003 8:20 PM
> To: Quarantine
> Cc: 'Steve Mickeler'; veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Media Types
> 
> 
> On Tue, 13 May 2003, Quarantine wrote:
> 
> > I wouldn't say that.  If you have a very narrow backup window and a 
> > lot of data, you should definitely consider STK.  There are *many* 
> > more considerations other than write time.
> 
> I think it does depend on precisely what your time and money 
> constraints are.  LTO-2 supposedly does 35MB/s native vs the 
> 19MB/s of 9840 and the 30MB/s of 9940.  So far, in my 
> experiences with IBM's tape gear (3590 and LTO-1), I've found 
> them to always be truthful about their drives' performance, 
> but I've yet to get an LTO-2 in hand.  Others might be able 
> to comment on their experience with it.
> 
> For high volume users, $/GB can become a very important 
> issue.  I'm getting LTO-1 stock at around $0.65/GB which is a 
> lot better than the $2.00+/GB for the DTF-1 tapes my company 
> had been using.  I expect that number to drop as LTO-2 
> becomes a more widely available.
> 
> To address the original poster's question, in addition to 
> looking at 9940 and 9840, AIT-3 would be worth looking at.  
> There's also S-AIT, which could be interesting (whenever it 
> comes to market).
> 
> -brian.
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