Your choice for AIT-2 is solid (2 generations, backward read/write compatible, investment in media usable in later generations, less than 2% AFFR (raw field failure rate over the past 4 years)NDMP compliant, etc.etc.

By the way, what have you heard about LTO's field reliability, cross-compatibility format compliance,(multiple manufacturers of LTO on the same format should be able to read data written by other mfgs. LTO units), media availability, and any actual backup/restore stories. I'd like to hear from anyone out there why they are looking at this format vs. sticking with DLT or transitioning from formats at the end of their cycles (DAT, Travan,etc.) 'Backup is worthless if you can't restore it.'

Doug Stringer Secondary Storage Marketing Manager Network Appliance 495 East Java Drive Sunnyvale, CA 94089 stringer@netapp.com 408-822-6764 telephone 408-822-4611 fax

-----Original Message----- From: svawter@c-cube.com [mailto:svawter@c-cube.com] Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 1:01 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Backups on F630 filers

I have four (4) F630 filers (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, upgrade!) and an additional two (2) F740 filers.

I want to direct attach at least 1 drive from a library to each filer and I want to use Ultrium LTO libraries. Failing LTO support, I would like to use AIT-2 libraries. The problem that I have is that neither of these is officially support on the F630 platform! (AIT-2 is on the F740)

Does anyone have AIT-2 running on F630? I don't want to run Mammoth, as I have heard too many horror stories (yes, I know that M2 beats AIT-2 by 2:1 for speed and by 10GB capacity, but that's irrelevant if the drive is down for maintenance much more often).

Better yet, does anyone have LTO running on a Filer of any model, preferably a F630? (since they are barely shipping LTO, I doubt it). If you don't know what LTO is, go looking at HP, Seagate or IBM. Seagate seems to have the best drive at 16mb/sec with 100gb capacity and I think that this is due to a variable speed motor (which should also allow it to kick HP & IBM's butt when you can't keep data streaming in at 15mb/sec or better!)

Steve Vawter voice: 408-490-5310 fax: 408-490-8615 Staff UNIX Systems Administrator Steve.Vawter@C-Cube.COM