Wanda,

I read all the replies already, and the Gresham idea looks the most
promising.

You will be telling your customer that their "DR vendor" is retarded, right?

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Wanda Prather
Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2009 6:34 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Desperation, DR, and four TS3100 libraries...

I'm drawing a blank here, any suggestions welcomed.

I have a TSM customer who makes their copypool tapes using a TS3200 with
LTO4 drives.
The TS3200 is a rack-mounted, 2 drive, 40-mumble slot standard ASCII
library.  No issues.
One copy pool, tapes vaulted and sent offsite.

They want to go to a commercial DR vendor site and do a DR test next week.
The commercial DR vendor, unbelievably, has no multi-drive LTO4-capable
libraries.

Instead, they want us to use 4 (count 'em, four) TS3100 libraries.
The TS3100 is a rack-mounted, 1 drive, 20-mumble slot standard ASCII
library.

There's only 1 copy pool, so all tapes were created on the same device
class.
Ignoring the which-carts-would-go-in-which-library issue, I can't have a
device class pointing to 4 libraries.

And, the TS3100 is built in such a way that unlike a TS3500, you can't open
the doors and access the drives for manual mounting.
(I'd be happy to pull the covers off and try it, ignoring any warranties I
might void, but I doubt the vendor will let me attack the thing with a
screwdriver/wrench/hacksaw.)

If I put all the carts in one TS3100 that will work, but that leaves me only
1 drive to restore all the clients, and they won't likely get done in the
desired time window.

The only thing I can think of to use all 4 drives, is to define those four
TS3100's as 1 manual library with 4 manual drives, and use the front panel
of each TS3100 to move tapes from the I/O slot to the drive when TSM
requests a mount.

(Actually the FIRST thing I thought of, was "cancel the DR contract, this is
nonsense".  But my customer isn't convinced yet...)

Anybody got a better solution?
I've already tried a margarita, it didn't help....

W