Re: Tape Reliability Recommendations

Hi Peter,

I sincerely empathize, as I've been living the same martyrdom as you
some months ago.
We had a brand new 3584 library, equiped with scsi lto drives, attached
to the server thru 2108 San data gateways and fiber channeling. After
months of investigation, upgrades of all kinds, drive exchanges etc ...
We finally found that the length of fiber cables was a little bit too
long, therefore generating timeouts errors, and subsequent tape
failures.
Don't know if it could be your case, but worth throwing an eye on it, if
not already done !
My 2 cents !

Arnaud  

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| Arnaud Brion, Panalpina Management Ltd., IT Group     |
| Viaduktstrasse 42, P.O. Box, 4002 Basel - Switzerland |
| Phone: +41 61 226 19 78 / Fax: +41 61 226 17 01       | 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Ford [mailto:PFord AT STENTOR DOT COM] 
Sent: Tuesday, 18 February, 2003 19:43
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Tape Reliability Recommendations


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kelly J. Lipp [mailto:lipp AT STORSOL DOT COM]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 10:32 AM
> To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> Subject: Re: Tape Reliability Recommendations
>
> As for reliability.  That turns out to be a very mixed bag.

<...snip...>

> For instance,
> we have a site with a large fiber channel and LTO
> configuration.  No end to
> the problems so far and they are very serious problems.  Is 
> this a result of
> the tape technology?  I doubt it, but one never knows, do one?\

I would be very curious to hear what type of reliability problems you
have seen with LTO.  I have posted here before, but we have been
experiencing an incredibly high number of read errors with our 3584 LTO
library.  We regularly see errors when trying to restore data from
tapes.  We have been auditing volumes recently and have seen errors on a
tape during one audit, and then audit again, with no errors.  There is
no discernable pattern to these errors (across multiple tapes and
multiple drives).  Due to the nature of the data we are backing up, the
data does not change often (and therefore the tapes are generally
written to once, and the data stays there), so over-used tapes should
not be an issue.  

Anything that you could share with the list, or me directly, would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Peter

    Peter Ford
    System Engineer

    
Stentor, Inc.
 5000 Marina Blvd, 
 Brisbane, CA 94005-1811  
 Main Phone: 650-228-5555
 Fax: 650 228-5566 
 http://www.stentor.com
 pford AT stentor DOT com 

>