On Thu, 14 Dec 2006, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:
I'm interested in whether anyone on the list has any experience or comments on my choice of tape changer, or comments on issues related to how it is configured and potential modes of upgrading (adding another tape drive, adding another changer, etc.)
You didn't say which AIT drive is going in your AIT changer. Here we have gone from AIT1 to AIT2 to AIT3. Just yesterday I ordered a new library with LTO3. What soured us on the AIT line is that AIT4 is not backwards read compatible with any earlier AIT drives. In other words if I went to AIT4 I would not be able to use it to even read any of our large existing collection of AIT1, 2, and 3 tapes. So at this point it no longer matters to us whether we stay with the AIT line or not. Depending on which AIT drive you're choosing, this may or may not be a concern for you. Given that it is for us, we took this as our opportunity to move to LTO, which is at least an industry standard with multiple vendors supplying drives. (Sony can take as long as they want to come out with the next generation of AIT, since they're the only supplier. We waited what seemed like forever for AIT3 to finally come out. Way past its expected release date. And AIT4 was promised all along to be backwards read compatible, but that was dropped at the very last minute.)
The tape changer I'm looking at is the Sony StorStation AIT Library LIB-162/A4. It is a carousel rather than a robot. It holds 16 tapes (3.2TB native, anybody's guess compressed) and can have a second tape drive added. It is significantly less expensive than the expandable robot systems I was looking at. Also, in the "expandable" systems, adding the expansions was very expensive.
Not sure what systems you looked at, but I was surprised to find that in the Qualstar RLS series of expandable libraries, adding more tape slots is not a big money proposition. The LTO library I ordered starts with 12 slots and is expandable up to 44 slots in increments of 8, for $1000 (list) per increment. As an .edu you may do better than that on price. Also with AIT slots being smaller, they might come cheaper, too. I don't know. Hope this helps in some way. -Mitch
