Autoloader and Jukebox with double picker.

[Helder Bittencourt]

Hi,
I work in Customer Support Center at HP Brazil (sorry about my English), and recently one customer asked me about some solution of backup (Autoloader or Jukebox) with double picker.
Exists any product from HP with this description?
What HP product is recommended to this customer?

Regards.

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

i don't know why the customer want's double pickers. For a library in my suggestion you neeed one 'hand' (picker) which handles the media and of course multiple drives.
You may have a look at:
http://www.enterprisestorage.hp.com/products/tape_libraries/automated_backup.html

Regards

[Rick Garland]

There are storage libraries out there with multiple pickers. But you better have the bucks to get one. VERY expensive!

[Dave Wherry]

I've not seen a double picker library so I do not know what is available. In a regular library you have multiple tapes, drives, interfaces.... - redundancy in everything except the picker. So I can see the desire for a double picker in case one jams or breaks. If you have 2 pickers in one library, could the failure of 1 interfer with the other? I don't know.
I have a 2/20 DLT8000 library. I've been looking at adding a 4/40 library for the additional drives, tape slots and picker. While a 6 drive 60 slot unit has advantages, I think I'm going with 2 units to mitigate the single point of failure.

[Helder Bittencourt]

Sorry,

I think I'm not been totally clear.
Here in Brazil we have another company who make backup machines with two hand and my customer want know if HP has one machine with double picker, too.

[Rick Garland]

I don't believe that HP actually makes the machines. They purchase a contract to sell some libraries, some of the StoregeTek's as an example, then they rebadge them to HP.

They will offer the support and maintenance on the machines.

I do know that StorageTek does make a two picker machine, but HP I would believe is just putting their own nameplate on the machine.