Our experience has been with 9840 (A's) and LTO gen 1 drives. The 9840s have been rock solid for years, while the LTO has had more failures in the past 14 months or so than all of our STK drives over the past 8 or so years.
The LTOs started off rough, but I must admit that lately things have stabalized, though we still have some oddities occur (may be SAN backup related). I wouldn't be concerned with the proprietary drives from STK.
Our libraries are a STK 4410, STK 9310 (11,000 slots total) and a IBM 3584 single frame. No problems with the robotics in any of them.
leonard
At 01:09 PM 9/30/2003 +0100, you wrote:
Hello
Anybody out there able to share their thoughts and experiences?
We're doing a technology refresh on some of our libraries and have a number of products in the frame: IBM 3584 / LTO-2 ADIC Scalar i2000 / LTO-2 HP ESL9322 / LTO-2 StorageTek L700e / T9940B
The interesting one from my point of view is the L700e with its T9940B drives. The performance/capacity comparisons between LTO-2 and T9940B seem close enough to make no difference which leaves cost and reliability as the differentiators.
Reliability will be an important factor in our decision and the T9940B seems to be marketed as a high duty cycle, 24 x 7 drive. Does anybody have any real world experieces in a TSM environment which suggest the T9940B is more (or less) reliable than LTO-2? Should I be concerned about going for a 'proprietary' technology like 9x40 instead of an 'open' standard like LTO?
Also, any thoughts on the libraries we are considering would be gratefully appreciated.
