An IBM TS3500 or TS3310 or Adic/Quantum I500 will meet your requirements. The TS3310 is a very good library and relatively inexpensive. It is rack-mounted, and can be configured to hold ~210 cartridges with 1 base unit (30 carts) and 2 expansion drawers (~90 each, depending on how many slots you assign as I/O slots). You can add a 3rd expansion unit of 90 carts in the future, reaching full rack height. Whether you can reuse your IBM drives you will have to confirm with IBM. One thing for sure is that the drive "sled" will have to be replaced, which will be an additional expense. Each drive is mounted in a frame called the drive "sled", which is unique to the library. The cartridges will not have to be rewritten, you just check them out of the old library and into the new one.
There is an ADIC/Quantum model of this library, the Scalar I-500. Again, you will need to contact ADIC/Quantum to determine whether they will let you reuse your drives. Exactly the same hardware as the TS3310, ADIC/Quantum firmware instead of IBM. The TS3500 is IBM's high-end ASCII-based library; it is free-standing and requires a significant amount of floor space for the library plus service/door clearances. It is expandable to 16 full-height frames totaling approx. a zillion cartridges. That is the model you should go with if you need high performance/ high availability features like dual grippers or a dual-robot HA configuration. Again, check with them about reusing the drives. These just happen to be the libraries I have the most experience with, but I like all 3 of them, all 3 are rock-solid. W -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU] On Behalf Of Dury, John C. Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 12:44 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] nightmares with a STK SL500 tape library, I'll try to answer your questions but there were a lot! The drives in both libraries are IBM LTO4 drives. Both libraries currently have different version library code although the faulty library has been upgraded several times to different versions as they were available, and the problem still occurred. Both libraries are connected to the same TSM server and each is on a different HBA. I've tried man different zoning options and they solved nothing. The LTO 4 drives have also been upgraded to newer firmware levels as they have become available., again solving nothing. I've looked in the SAN switch and in TSM and see nothing explaining why the robot is going offline. I've sent several logs from the robot itself and STK/SUN/ORACLE support says they see no errors except that the robot has gone offline. They have said when visiting, that the robot seems to vibrate/shimmy sometimes which is why they think it Is going offline. They also told me that there was a known issue in previous library firmware versions, that if the management Ethernet cable was plugged in, it could cause the robot to go offline (something to do with surges from the network switch) but this was supposedly fixed in the version we are running. Currently we have the Ethernet unplugged (remember data goes across fiber only) to see if this solves anything. Unfortunately it may be a month or longer before we even know. Absurd! Hopefully that answered some of all of your questions. Thanks for responding btw.
