On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Jon Bousselot wrote:

> [...] If you are patient, you can do everything on the front panel
> through the web interface, except power cycle the box.  If we had to buy
> a box now, the LTO-2 format would probably make a 10 foot wide S10K seem
> like overkill, but that happens every time a higher density tape format
> emerges.  I keep hearing about the carosel options available for the
> 10k, which replace some of the standard two dimensional tape slots and
> make the library deeper instead of just wide.  Our base model came with
> 700 slots active (the next increment is about $1k/100 slots / year) and
> we're only 200 tapes away from justifying an expansion.  It's all
> software licensed, so you type a few keys, then load 100 more tapes.
> Spectralogic and Qualstar make some dense AIT libraries.  Now with AIT-4
> being 200G native, that's a lot of bits in a small cabinet!

Hey, even Sony's AIT site doesn't say anything about AIT-4 except as
being something on the roadmap.  AFAIK, AIT-4 isn't even close to being
available yet.  Are you sure you're not getting confused with Sony's
S-AIT half-inch format (500GB native/cart)?

I looked at AIT-3 about a year ago.  It wasn't ready for prime time.
The Spectralogic folks were trying to sell me a 64000 with AIT-3, but
the AIT-3 drives didn't have all the bugs out of them.  We've had
decent experiences with AIT-2, so I'm guessing the AIT-3 gear about on
par with AIT-2 in terms of reliability.

I ended up going with an ADIC Scalar 10K w/LTO-1.  ADIC use IBM drives,
which I've always found to be of the highest quality, performance, and
reliability (well worth the extra cost).  We've been hammering our
drives nearly 24x7 for the past seven or eight months without problems.

A few years ago, I was running IBM 3590 drives in one of their 3494
libraries.  That's another very reliable solution, but the capacity
doesn't meet my requirements here.  They also sell an LTO version of the
same library, the 3584, but it takes up a lot more space than a similar
capacity ADIC Scalar 10K.

And FWIW, I've never heard anything good about StorageTek libraries, and
the one time I had firsthand experience with them was at the job where I
ran the 3494 library.  The IT group had a StorageTek DLT library, and
about once every two weeks I had to slide a rack of my disk drives out
of their way so the StorageTek service guy could access their library to
repair it. :-)

Based on a past year of positive experiences with ADIC and their Scalar
10K, I think today I'd opt for one of their new Scalar i2Ks with LTO-2.
ADIC are also working on supporting Sony's S-AIT drives, so that's
another upgrade path if you don't want to go with LTO-2 or wait around
for LTO-3.  I'm interested in S-AIT myself, but this is Sony's first
foray into single spool half-inch tape.

-brian.