4/40 to 6/60 Upgrade Possible?

[CA948268]

Hello:

I have a customer that would like to upgrade his A6315A Ultrium library. He currently has 4 x A6307A Ultrium drives, 40 slots, and 2 x A4674A fibre bridges.

He would like to upgrade to a six drive, 60-slot configuration, and therein lies the confusion.

HP's manuals are just ambiguous enough to make it sound like this is equally possible and impossible. It looks like, however, that the A6315A can scale to four drives and 60 slots, but not six drives. If he wanted to scale to six drives, then he should have bought the A6318A that can have 2, 4, or 6 drives.

What complicates things is that a broker is perfectly willing to sell him the parts but I would rather not see somebody buy parts that they cannot use or be misled. I am quite sure that this cannot be upgraded to a 6/60 based on conversations with some HP VARs. HP, by the way, is equally ambiguous with the customer on the phone and will not confirm or deny the upgrade or lack thereof.

Does anybody know of a pdf file or source I can direct the customer to for the final word?

Thanks!

[BR19682]

Hi there.
Yes, it should be possible.
What you need is another box to put under the existing ones. Then the mechanism for the tape transport must be extended to this box.
From the software side pls check your licences,
whether you need extra licences for additional drives and tape slots.
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes