We purchased an STK SL500 tape library with 4 LTO4 drives in it a few years ago and we have had nothing but problems with it, almost from the beginning. It is fully loaded with LTO4 cartridges (about 160) and seems to randomly just crash and take all of the drives offline to TSM. We also have a second SL500 that is at a remote site and connected to the same TSM server , and it has no problems at all. The remote SL500 has copies (backup stg pool) of the local SL500. We've gone round and round with STK/Oracle support and they have actually come onsite and physically replaced the entire robot and all of it's parts, several times and they can never find a reason as to what is causing it to go offline. Keep in mind this has been happening about once a month or so for over a year.
My questions to all of you is not so much what could be wrong (although if you have ideas, that would be great also), but, we are considering a new robot and are hoping to be able to use or reuse our existing LTO4 tapes. Right now it has about 80 scratches so if we were to goto a second library, I should be able to have both defined to TSM and move the data from one to the other after putting some of the scratches in the new library and labeling/initializing them until all data is in the new library and then I can light the old one on fire (j/k) ! Like most IT departments we are severely budget constrained so we would like to reuse the tape drives and the tape cartridges and only purchase a robot that can handle 160 slots or so. Suggestions if this is even an option or which robots and/or models to look at? Remember, very little budget for this if I could even get it approved at all but we really don't know what else to do with the bad SL500 at this point and we have a project coming up that is going to increase the amount and flow of data to our TSM system significantly within the new few years. Help! John