Hi Again,
Sorry for not sending this sooner.
We still have not decided on what we wanted to do but
we are leaning towards ait. The only show stopper
there
are
a) a single vendor
b) availability of media - which can get better
(??)
I will leave the audience to decide on what they
decide.
Thanks to:
Chris Marble
Jan-Olaf Droese
Matt Reynolds
schaefer@llnl.gov alias Wolf
Michael Wang
leed@chele.cais.net
Kevin M. Korb
Gary Jenson
Gallagher, Gerald (RTIS)
Chad Price
jj@ ennovatenetworks.com
Terje J. Hanssen
Here are the responses and they have all been helpful.
Some even suggested 8mm and I have included it here.
Goodluck !!
-------
We needed something bigger than our DDS-3 drives and
did the same
survey
a year ago. We went with AIT. The drives were
smaller and less
expensive.
We went with an AIT-2 drive for 50Gb uncompressed on a
single tape. We
bought the drive from Cybernetics because they were
the only ones with
them in stock at the time.
We thought that AIT could fit more on a tape while
remaining downwardly
compatable than DLT could. I'm talking about future
generations of the
drives. It's thought that the 50Gb DLT will be the
last version that
will read and write the older 15Gb (or were they 10Gb)
tapes.
We liked the AIT claim of no cleaning tapes required.
-------
We are currently using three AIT drives (two of them
in a 40 slot
library)
and two DLT in our company.
The AIT library is in oparation for a year now and we
are very
satisfied:
Works reliably, no need for cleaning tapes, no
tape-related problems so
far. We get approx. 3k/s transfer rate to the tapes.
The main reason
for
choosing AIT was the possibility to upgrade our
library from Exabyte
to AIT. Another reason was the active development in
the AIT technology.
We will be upgrading the drives from AIT 1 to AIT 2 in
the next weeks.
Disatvantage of AIT is that only Sony makes drives (I
think Seagate has
discontinued their AIT production), so you are
dependent on one
manufacturer. AIT tapes are smaller than DLT, so more
of them will fit
in our safe.
With the DLT drives I had mixed experiences: One runs
flawlessly for
a year now, the other has been replaced three times
because of various
errors. I think DLT has a lower price per gig for the
media, but you
should check this, my calculation was done a year ago.
-------
I switched from DLT to AIT - the biggest factor is
speed! Compared to AIT's, DLT's are ssslllooowwww.
-------
I have been looking at them also. I currently have a
dlt4500
and I'm dumping DLt. AIT is a lot more reliable, less
mechanical
stuff, and AIT2 supports higher compression. I'm
looking in
purchasing the Spectra Logic BullFrog. By the way I
think DLT
is EOL.
-------
I purchased DLT but after further research I found
that I should
have used Exabyte 8mm. 8mm can hold 60GB native and
faster than
DLT. Mammoth III which will be released next year can
hold 300GB.
-------
Actually several months ago, I have same problem like
you. I study the
document and pick AIT 2 from SONY. The performance
and capacity is
very
good and compatible with our SUN E450 (Solaris 2.7)
without problem.
The
AIT 2 tape drive is NOT expensive but cartridge is
very expensive
($120/tape). We decide next tape drive purchase DLT
8000 (for high
end)
and DLT1 (for low end). The reason are:
1. DLT tape driver more expensive (around $5500),
but very stable
2. cartridge is cheaper (around $75/tape).
3. performance and capacity similiar to AIT2.
4. back end compatible to our DLT4000.
-------
I prefer AIT. It holds more and is significantly
cheaper. Also, I
believe
that DLT is at the end of it's life while AIT is just
starting.
-------
I'm looking at the same thing. I like the
price/featuresof AIT.
I looked at the Spectralogic products and thought they
looked pretty
worthwhile. I like the barcoding, and I also think
that the capacity
issue
is going to keep marching down the path of AITs favor.
-------
I only have direct experience with exabyte 8mm on
UNIX, but I recently
had
to make the same decision. I heard the AIT tapes were
not always easy
to
obtain. That, and the fact that we already had one DLT
tape drive, lead
me
to choose DLT 8000. Please share the responses you get
- I'd be very
interested in what the rest of the group thinks.
-------
Not to make your decision more complex but after
checking pricing stats
etc... We chose to go with
the Exabyte Mammoth 2. I've got a Exabyte 220 library
with a single
drive and 21 tape capacity for about
$11k. That bought us 1.2TB of uncompressed storage at
about 43gb per
hour. I can later add a second drive
to multiplex if time becomes an issue. We use Veritas
NetBackup as the
backup platform. It also comes with
a bar code reader standard. Love it.
-------
I choosed the new 8 mm AIX-1 from Ecrix because of the
reasonable price for high relatively capasity and
robustness,
compared to DLT and AIT.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:14:05 CDT