TS1150 and JB tapes

[Lars-Owe]

Hi all!

Our library is getting full, so we're considering an upgrade from TS1140 to TS1150 in order to keep the number of tapes within limits. Another option would be to pay a license fee to open up the last 400 slots in the S24 frame. Unfortunately the TS1150 cannot read JB tapes. We have some 700 of those, along with 240 JC tapes.

The obvious method would be to buy 300 JC tapes to get rid of our JB tapes beforehand, and then upgrade (which really wouldn't be necessary any time soon then...). However, the cost of those tapes would be similar to the drive upgrade. Is there a smarter way to do the conversion and benefit from the fact that TS1150 can store more data per JC (or even JD) tape?

Best Regards,
lars-owe

 

[moon-buddy]

You did not mention how many TS1140 drives you have. The options depend on how many TS1140 is at hand.

I was faced with a similar problem. My solution was to update half of the older tape drives to the newer drive, move the data slowly over the new drive/tape combination. I then slowly decommissioned the old tape drives one at a time as the number of older tapes starts to go down.

But, somewhere down the line, I still added more slots for organic growth.

Bottom line - you would be forced doing drive updates and adding slots sooner or later.

 

[Lars-Owe]

Thanks for the tip. We have eight TS1140 at present, and during normal operations I guess maybe five would suffice, but when a drive breaks and we get an unexpected ingest they are all needed.

I was thinking along the lines of doing the upgrade in two steps, keeping one or maybe two TS1140 for a while. However, isn't it tricky to steer the use of drives for different purposes without setting up yet another library manager?

Over the years my experience is that growth in media capacity is almost enough to cover our data growth, so 7 or 10TB tapes instead of 1.6 would postpone the necessary library upgrade significantly. This is good, as there's really no physical space available to expand in the current server room.

 

[moon-buddy]

However, isn't it tricky to steer the use of drives for different purposes without setting up yet another library manager?

Not at all. What you can do is mark the old tapes as read only which will force TSM to use the new tapes and tape drive combination as you do migration and normal operations.

No need for another library manager.