=> On Wed, 30 Oct 2002 16:42:14 -0600, "Coats, Jack" <Jack.Coats AT 
BANKSTERLING DOT COM> said:

> From my fox hole, LTO works great, but in some ways it is 'to big'.  The
> spin time on the tapes is measured as about 3 minutes to rewind and unmount
> a tape.  Meaning if you have to scan down a tape to restore a file it can be
> a while.  Very fast tapes tend to be small, so it is a real tradeoff.

> Speed of restore is starting to be a factor here and I have seen several
> posts where that is becoming more of an issue at many sites.  But the
> architecture of TSM that makes it great, also gets in the way of high speed
> restores, unless you have lots of slots in a large library for a relatively
> small number of clients (co-location and/or backup sets - for theses many
> smaller tapes might be better, but I digress).


Our call on this is congealing: Use the LTO for less-often-read storage.
i.e.: copy pools.  If we can have primary pools on 3590s, we can get up to 60G
raw on the -K volumes.  That seems plenty at the moment.

We can use the 200G-raw (coming soon!) LTO volumes for copies, and read from
them correspondingly less often.

LTO drives are, at the very least, a cheap way to increase your drive count.

- Allen S. Rout