-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
I've deployed and worked with several at different clients so far and
my opinion seems to be shared with the STK deployment engineers so far.
The only thing going for it as far as my experience goes, is the expandability
or growth potential which translates into TCO. When they work, they work
fine except for any interaction you have with them directly. NBU knowns how
to manage them well. I've worked with most of the other STK libraries except
for
the SL8500 and here are my gripes:
Manual intervention includes 2 buttons and 5 LEDs that blink in a strange
and partially undocumented way. There was plans for an LCD interface that
would sit inside the grill, but that has not made it out of STK/Sun yet.
The out of band management is through a user unfriendly GUI that now also
runs on Solaris but used to only be windows. With this gui, you can see
some parameters but not all. There is no way of seeing exactly what is
happening
within the library in real time. Most enterprise libraries have this, like the
web page that the L180 and L700 and others have, where you can watch the picker
take
a tape and move it to a drive for instance. It wasn't until recently that you
could
get an inventory of the library through this management tool. Thank goodness
for
robtest but some customers are talking about doing the closed circuit TV thing
again to see what is going on.
There have been several topics pop up where even the support and field engineers
didn't know how it works. For instance, setting up automatic cleaning and
getting a count on how many times that cleaning took place.
Since the picker or robot is a shelf that moves up and down the SL500, there
are circumstances
where it gets in a stuck state if the power is reset or down and requires the
use
of the "magic ratchet bar" so that you can open the door to reset things. Hard
to explain, only through experience can you appreciate that one.
They do work, but from an enterprise stand point, there are better solutions,
even
from STK/Sun, but thats only my opinion.
Thanks
Peter
Peter DrakeUnderkoffler
Xinupro, LLC
617-834-2352
Justin Piszcz wrote:
> We will be receiving an EVAL unit soon and wonder if anyone had any
> opinions on this library? For instance, how reliable is it compared
> to say, an L700?
> Suppose an L700 is better, but the other problem is STK is deprecating
> that library soon and the SL500 is going to be the newly supported
> library.
>
> Justin.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFEYy+6l+lekZRM55oRAkYpAJ9lcx51jcrwtsVP6WOOfuMY8r+GWQCfY0sJ
4tYozooLGbBCuhUImKKo8qU=
=/f31
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
|
