On Thu, 12 Feb 1998, Dave Cole wrote:

-I am in the process of evaluating tape units and came upon the -startling discovery that (as of at least) ontap 4.3R3, there is still -no support for the Exabyte Mammoth tape drive. - -Does anyone know any details about this issue? I would really like to -be able to recommend the Exabyte Mammoth 20/40GB tape drives.

Do any of the netapp-employed people who frequent this list have any insight into proposed support for tape drives and changers? How about insight into why ONTAP is designed to completely shut down the moment it sees an unsupported tape drive during bootup?

I'm not that hung up on changer support local to the netapp. I do our backups with dump/rmt to a tape changer on a unix box across a switched 100t backbone, and only intend on attaching a spare/floater tape drive to the netapp if we need to do a complete restore when the clock is ticking. I do so love 'dump' and 'restore'. :)

We currently have 8 netapps at our location, and doing local backups on all of them would be either a nightmare to either our tape jockey (me) or our accountant (not me), depending if we went with 8 single drives or 8 autochangers respectively.

Ultimately, I'm quite jazzed about someday seeing commercial archive software that will do efficent remote backups of netapps. The agreement recently signed between Legato and NetApp looks promising.

------------------------------------------------------------- Dave Cole (DC1110) | dacole@netcom.ca Systems Administrator | dacole@vex.net | office/~dacole/ Netcom Canada | www.vex.net/~dacole/ 905 King Street West, Toronto, M6K 3G9 | phone - 416.341.5801 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Earth, Sol | fax - 416.341.5725