ADSM-L

Re: opinion on AIT vs LTO and 3570 tape technology?

2002-06-03 07:50:18
Subject: Re: opinion on AIT vs LTO and 3570 tape technology?
From: Paul Zarnowski <vkm AT CORNELLC.CIT.CORNELL DOT EDU>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 07:47:52 -0400
Lisa,

We went through this exercise ourselves about 6 months ago.  AIT does look
good on paper, with it's faster access times.

Salak made the point,
Ait access time really shine when the chip on tape is supported by the
application.  You may want to check whether TSM supports it.

TSM does not support this chip, at least not in the way that would exploit
the faster access times.  Before counting on these faster access times, I
would find some real-life data with TSM.

As far as scalable libraries, ADIC supports multi-media, including both LTO
and AIT.  Their libraries are quite nice, and scale higher than the 3584.

The decision point for us, tho, was that we could not find sites using AIT
that had the level of high usage that our site has.  The couple that we did
find had run into some problems, some of which were startup problems that
were resolved and some of which were ongoing.  If you are looking at high
duty-cycles, I would look at this issue more closely.  I believe that the
IBM LTO drives in particular, are more robustly manufactured than the Sony
AIT drives or the non-IBM LTO drives.  Like Don said, the IBM LTO drives
seem to getting a high acceptance rate in general, and within the TSM
community.  While you don't hear too many AIT problems in the TSM
community, I don't believe they are used as widely, especially in
high-usage environments.  All tape technology has some problems.

We opted to go with an ADIC Scalar 10000 with IBM LTO drives.  The ADIC
library gives us the option of changing tape technologies down the road, if
something better comes along.

..Paul
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