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General discussion

LTO-2 tape drive vendor

Jan 31, 2005 5:27AM PST

I am planning to buy LTO-2 tape drive. Can you share your expereinces with the tape drive vendors you have now? The one I have been checking are like HP, ADIC, exabyte and others.... Hoping to get response.... Thanks in advance

Discussion is locked

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LTO advice
Jan 31, 2005 8:22AM PST

LTO is a fine tape technology for which the number of actual Manufacturers of the device is far exceeded by the number of re-labellers. However, I hesitate to give too specific advice, as I don't know if this is for personal (home) use, SOHO, small business, or even large business. The nature, quality, and type of support you can get for these products varies widely in quality, useability, and price. The larger the enviornment you are buying for the more critical these become.

Since it is tape we're talking here the questions for you go something like this: When it breaks (NOT IF) what are my options? What's the turnaround time on repairs? Can I afford to be out of comission that long? How much will I have to spend to be able to ever read all my backup data again?

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LTO Drive
Feb 1, 2005 12:22AM PST

holtnr, thanks for your response. That's exactly my point. Our hardware vendor is suggesting us to buy ADIC Faststor2. Having not worked with ADIC before, I am kind hesitant to invest good chunk of money in it.

Right now, we have Seagate's DDS4 autloader, but 200GB for a week is not enough so looking for alternate drive.

It's more about the vendor's customer support and repair policy more than price.

Thanks again for your input. Hope you and others may have more to share about the LTO2 tape drive vendors.

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lto2
Feb 5, 2005 7:47AM PST

amazing technology. Please believe me it is the best technology available to man at the moment...cartridge memory/adaptive tape speed/servo tracks preformatted on tape making allignment a thing of the past...very fast seek time/most advanced compression engine available on the marketplace...etc etc
Before buying go to hp.com/support/pat and download some of th performance tools lik the PAT test to confirm whether your disk subsystem is up to it or not....at around 60MB/s you are expectinh fiber attached SAN diskarray to provide the necessary thoughput of data....and a u320 card as bust rate is 160MB/s....amazing performance once the host is not the bottleneck. RAMDISH utility software can also be used if you have a lot of free memory and a backup to disk facility on your ISV software.
Believe me it is simply the best...also has a 100% duty cycle...DDS4 only has a 12% duty cycle equating to maxamum of two tapes being pulled through on a read or write per day....so only 80GB in total can be backed up assuming 2:1 compression.
amazing technology,,,,,imagine now tape is faster thes disk with serial access Happy
best of luck...andy

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Support
Feb 6, 2005 1:06AM PST

Is your "hardware vendor" going to be providing support as well, or are they only a re-seller? Since I dont know who they are, I can say this without potentially libeling or offending anybody unduly. A vendor who sells a product, AND has to provide post sales support services is a safer bet that an "iron pumper only". Beware, too the sub-contractor supplied service ploy. In addition some vendors will sell you a "deal" to get their foot in the door, and try to leverage more of their product in the door as time goes on, without regard to how suitable their "solutions" are to your situation.

Since I don't know anything about ADIC, I can't give you any advice about them, nor would I, since I am in the business myself, and that would be a "conflict of interest". However, I would ask the hardware vendor who the actual manufacturer of the "brick" inside the option is, since I suspect it is probably a re-labelled product. Then, if you feel comfortable with the answer. (ie, it's an OLD and Reliable company that's likely to be there when you need it) And the service is acceptable, go with it. If the service is not acceptable, query the "brick's" vendor if THEY would support the product.

Since you are asking for advice, I suspect that your comfort level with your vendor isn't what you would like it to be, "satisfied" customers usually don't ask these questions. For, EVERY vendor out there you will hear KUDOs and "Horror Stories", so asking advice is somewhat chancy at best. A small local vendor with an established track record can be better than an International Megaplex because you would be a much larger, hence - more important, customer to the local company.

Of interest here too is the question of Software Solution selected. If you are going for a particular software backup solution, query the software vendor for their recommendations, especially for HArdware vendors who also have Application Specific Software specialists.
In any case: Caveat Emptor