STANLEY R. HORWITZ wrote:

On Oct 8, 2010, at 5:03 PM, Werth, Dave wrote:

Stan, where you say "for the price", do you mean that the prices are
reasonable, or minimally competitive, for what you're getting, or the
price is on the higher end but well worth the extra?

Also, what all (say, in a nutshell) was involved in getting it to work
with NW? I thought NW had long supported Qualstar, but maybe your's was

a newer model they'd not yet tested? Just curious.

Compared with similar tape libraries with the same type of tape drives from other companies such as Sun, IBM, and Spectralogic, the cost to purchase our Qualstar unit and annual maintenance was very competitive. The Qualstar tape library I have now is two years old so I don't remember the details, but as I recall, competing tape libraries and their annual maintenance were more money compared with our Qualstar.

As far as setting it up and working, I suppose it depends on your environment 
and the experience you bring to the project. I have each of the four tape 
drives' fiber channel line plugged into one of three dual channel HBA cards in 
a Dell 2950. The robotic line goes to a small SAN switch which has nothing else 
on it other then a line that goes to one of the HBA cards on our Del 2950. At 
the time I set this up I was a total novice with Linux system management so it 
took me a week or two to figure out how to get it all to work, not to mention 
that I somehow burned through two motherboards on our Dell 2950 before we got 
one that worked. I found that the tech support from Qualstar and Dell was first 
rate in helping me figure out how to get it to work. I did have to engage tech 
support from both companies quite a bit, but most likely that was because I was 
green behind the ears with this stuff. Someone with more experience would have 
been able to get it to work much more quickly.

!

 My biggest gripe with the Qualstar is that its documentation is confusing. The 
issues I had did not involve NetWorker at all, but purely on the Linux side 
figuring out how to get the Dell server to see the tape drives and robot.

One thing that just occurred to me ... our Qualstar reads tape labels upside 
down or right side up. It seems as if different tape media vendors affix LTO-3 
tape labels upside down and some do it right side up. I never gave it a second 
thought because I thought all LTO-3 tape libraries would be fine with that 
until I got to SunGard and their IBM tape library that we lease from them for 
DR purposes wasn't as flexible. The SunGard tech support engineer had to spend 
a good deal of time figuring out how to get their tape library to read our tape 
labels, which honed into the time I had allotted to me for my DR exercise. So 
keep that in mind if you also use SunGard for DR services.

Interesting point, either way.

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