Hi Tim,
I PERSONALY would lean towards LTO for few reasons:
1) It is an open standard. (When they can get all the vendors equipment working
with each other, you will benefit from, posibility to buy your equipment from
different vendors) Also given there are at least 3 vendors out there, there
will be competition to lower the cost. Just the tape cost has gone from over
200 dollars to about 150 in the last few months.
2) It has a pretty agresive road map. (But I believe the next generations will
not be backwards competable with LTO gen 1)
3) You might be able to get better performance and service if you match your
drives with the servers. E.g. Buy HP drives for HP servers etc. I was able to
get over 40 Megs a second on HP (UX) with HP with 1 fibre attached drive.
(About 35 Megs/second sustained over close to a Terabyte of data...)
Ofcourse it was a database backup (high compression 700 gig tapes :)). We get
about 20 Megs/sec with IBM LTO on NT platform with everyday data (over 120 gig
tapes).
One thing to watch out is the restore speeds....
Also LTO does have few tools enhancements that should inrease the life of the
drive and the tape, as well as give you ability to better track possible errors.
(Try Reading the IBM LTO Redbook, it has a lot of valuable information)
As for SDLT. The DLT in the name scares me :) I have not heard anything good
about it yet but LTO performance is better... Perhaps you have a need to read
old DLT tapes?
I would actually look in to the STK drives and the Sony DTF technology rather
than SDLT if I were to go with a single vendor... DTF at about 25 MB/sec is
faster than most, and does have a bigger native storage capacity. STK is
comming up with higher capacity drives (pretty soon, unless they haven't started
shiping yet). I have heard they get great compression with even the older
9840's (I guess that is what the number is :) ) people using them are pretty
happy, they offer great speed and access time to data (LTO standard has a
smaller tape format with fast access too).
Well this is my personal take on the market at the time.... I guess it depends
on your environment, e.g. what is the current technology used, is data acess
time important or would you perfer a higher native capacity etc...
Take care,
Yucel
---------------------------------------------------------
Yucel M. Erbilgic
erbilgic.ym AT pg DOT com
(513) 945-1859
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