I am a little behind in reading my mail.  But we have an early ship
model of the 3494 (SN 10010) and the robot shaft and all the bearings
finally gave out. We had this library since the summer of 1993.  Over a
5 day period, IBM replace the shaft, x cable, y cable,1 gripper,
accessor power supply and all the bearings on the bottom of the robot.
We experience about 4 days of scatter outages.  It may be time to
consider the H1A options.  We had every tape specialist in town going
thru our shop during those days.  The shaft on the early robots was made
of machine piece of stainless steel.  The replacement was some black
Teflon cover metal shaft.


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
David Bronder
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 9:19 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Re: 3494/3584 HA1 High Availability Option - is it worth
it?

Like Wanda and Bob, we've had our 3494 for coming up on 7 years now.
In that time, though, we've never had a robot failure, nor have we had
to run in manual mode.

We have the dual-gripper option, though, and that's saved us several
times when we've had gripper failures.  For example, the time the
gripper was flinging tapes around inside the library.  The bad gripper
had to be manually disabled since the LM thought it was fine.  But the
second gripper kept us in automated mode.

Another reason for the HA1 option, though, is performance.  If you have
a really large 3494 (pushing 16 frames), dual robots apparently can be
a big boost to mount service times.  Or so says the IBM tape Top Gun
who was here over the weekend helping us expand our 3494.  Fortunately,
our library isn't that big (and I don't expect it to ever get that big).

=Dave

Prather, Wanda wrote:
>
> Ditto.
> Our 3494 is 7 years old now.
> Same experience with failures (1-2 a year).
> Same experience waiting for the plane to arrive with parts!
> We also just put it in manual mode and tough it out until the repairs
> are done.