Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/03/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Spencer, LTO4 tapes are around $30/ea on ebay in lots of 20. The drives are $thousands, but one drive is infinite offline storage. John Spencer Cheng wrote: > Hi John, > > Very nice. The techie in me says "Cool. Can I borrow it?" :) > > I am not sure I want to know how much those LT04 tapes are. :)) > > My home built NAS cost about $1K including 5.5Tb of disk space. Good > enough for my purpose. Nowhere near as cool as yours though. > > Regards, > Spencer > > On Mar 22, 2010, at 20:22, John Nebel wrote: > >> Hi Spencer, >> >> Your post motivated me to photo part of the internals of a backup device, >> a robotic tape library with a petabyte capacity (600+ 1.6 terabyte tapes). >> >> http://www.ancientmoney.org/library.html >> >> If one has the space, time, and and a bit of knowledge, things like this >> can be acquired fairly inexpensively. I had installed a couple of LTO4 >> tape drives, and someone in Quantum service became upset and canceled a >> $20K/year maintenance contract - one is not allowed to work on their own >> equipment under their rules. >> Generally speaking, it is a reasonable position, however, not in every >> case. Quantum left me stranded with a broken hoist cable for the robotics >> platform, and I'd made the mistake of power-cycling the library and >> nothing would come online. The tape drive enclosures have electronic >> switches which only allow the drives to power up after the robotic >> diagnostics succeed. $10 for stainless steel aircraft cable (not for use >> in aircraft, of course) and $50 for cutting and swaging tools and it was >> back in operation. >> >> Quantum gave a credit for the prepaid maintenance which bought a pallet >> of tapes. Ultimately Quantum was apologetic and showed good integrity. >> >> I found a used library for $5.5K which works perfectly and provides the >> necessary backup for the backup device. >> >> In the process I looked into the library's controller and found its OS >> quite comforting, Linux. The OCP is a tiny flat screen xterm with a four >> button keyboard and the library runs Apache for its web interface. I >> think the interface between the robotics and the processor is serial with >> simple ascii commands. The interface between the tape drives and the >> outside is fibre channel through bridge cards. One talks to the Linux >> processor over ethernet, however, there is also a fibre channel card in >> the controller so that robotic commands may be sent via scsi over fc by >> the hosts. > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information