What have people done regarding Open Systems VTL's?

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Prather, Wanda
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2011 7:04 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] nightmares with a STK SL500 tape library

What brand of LTO4 drives are in your STK library?



-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Dury, John C.
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2011 6:11 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] nightmares with a STK SL500 tape library

We purchased an STK SL500 tape library with 4 LTO4 drives in it a few years
ago and we have had nothing but problems with it, almost from the beginning.
It is fully loaded with LTO4 cartridges (about 160) and seems to randomly
just crash and take all of the drives offline to TSM. We also have a second
SL500 that is at a remote site and connected to the same TSM server , and it
has no problems at all. The remote SL500 has copies (backup stg pool) of the
local SL500. We've gone round and round with STK/Oracle support and they
have actually come onsite and physically replaced the entire robot and all
of it's parts, several times and they can never find a reason as to what is
causing it to go offline. Keep in mind this has been happening about once a
month or so for over a year.

My questions to all of you is not so much what could be wrong (although if
you have ideas, that would be great also), but, we are considering a new
robot and are hoping to be able to use or reuse our existing LTO4 tapes.
Right now it has about 80 scratches so if we were to goto a second library,
I should be able to have both defined to TSM and move the data from one to
the other after putting some of the scratches in the new library and
labeling/initializing them until all data is in the new library and then I
can light the old one on fire (j/k) !
Like most IT departments we are severely budget constrained so we would like
to reuse the tape drives and the tape cartridges and only purchase a robot
that can handle 160 slots or so. Suggestions if this is even an option or
which robots and/or models to look at? Remember, very little budget for this
if I could even get it approved at all but we really don't know what else to
do with the bad SL500 at this point and we have a project coming up that is
going to increase the amount and flow of data to our TSM system
significantly within the new few years.
Help!
John