An IBM TS3500 or TS3310 or Adic/Quantum I500 will meet your requirements.

The TS3310 is a very good library and relatively inexpensive.  It is 
rack-mounted, and can be configured to hold ~210  cartridges with 1 base unit 
(30 carts) and 2 expansion drawers (~90 each, depending on how many slots you 
assign as I/O slots).  You can add a 3rd expansion unit of 90 carts in the 
future, reaching full rack height.  Whether you can reuse your IBM drives you 
will have to confirm with IBM.  One thing for sure is that the drive "sled" 
will have to be replaced, which will be an additional expense.  Each drive is 
mounted in a frame called the drive "sled", which is unique to the library.  
The cartridges will not have to be rewritten, you just check them out of the 
old library and into the new one.

There is an ADIC/Quantum model of this library, the Scalar I-500.  Again, you 
will need to contact ADIC/Quantum to determine whether they will let you reuse 
your drives.  Exactly the same hardware as the TS3310, ADIC/Quantum firmware 
instead of IBM.

The TS3500 is IBM's high-end ASCII-based library; it is free-standing and 
requires a significant amount of floor space for the library plus service/door 
clearances.  It is expandable to 16 full-height frames totaling approx. a 
zillion cartridges.  That is the model you should go with if you need high 
performance/ high availability features like dual grippers or a dual-robot HA 
configuration.   Again, check with them about reusing the drives.  

These just happen to be the libraries I have the most experience with, but I 
like all 3 of them, all 3 are rock-solid.  

W


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Dury, John C.
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 12:44 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] nightmares with a STK SL500 tape library,

I'll try to answer your questions but there were a lot! The drives in both 
libraries are IBM LTO4 drives. Both libraries currently have different version 
library code although the faulty library has been upgraded several times to 
different versions as they were available, and the problem still occurred. Both 
libraries are connected to the same TSM server and each is on a different HBA. 
I've tried man different zoning options and they solved nothing. The LTO 4 
drives have also been upgraded to newer firmware levels as they have become 
available., again solving nothing. I've looked in the SAN switch and in TSM and 
see nothing explaining why the robot is going offline. I've sent several logs 
from the robot itself and STK/SUN/ORACLE support says they see no errors except 
that the robot has gone offline. They have said when visiting, that the robot 
seems to vibrate/shimmy sometimes which is why they think it Is going offline. 
They also told me that there was a known issue in previous library firmware 
versions, that if the management Ethernet cable was plugged in, it could cause 
the robot to go offline (something to do with surges from the network switch) 
but this was supposedly fixed in the version we are running. Currently we have 
the Ethernet unplugged (remember data goes across fiber only) to see if this 
solves anything. Unfortunately it may be a month or longer before we even know. 
Absurd! Hopefully that answered some of all of your questions.
Thanks for responding btw.