Linux robotic arm DP 6.11 and STK L700E

[CIBER Unix]

We have a rather old STK L700E library with Ultrium drives; its robotic arm is currently controlled via a SCSI attached dedicated PA-RISC rp5450 server running HP-UX 11.0. All it does is control the robotic arm; the media servers are on other machines in a different location, so it is really just a dedicated applicance for the robotic arm.

Following a recent move, there isn't really enough room in the new data centre for the HP server (yes - the room is SMALL!), and we would like to replace it with something smaller (preferably 1U).

Our environment is a selection of HP-UX/Linux/Windows servers at one location, with the tape library and old HP server at another. The cell server and all media servers are HP-UX.

We don't want to re-architect the environment, as there is a separate project looking at backups, so we would just like to replace that old server to something supportable.

The preferred option would be a small Itanium standalone machine, but these are very expensive and overkill for the role, so it is unlikely that we could go for that option. We don't have a blade enclosure there either, so a small blade isn't an option.

So, the alternative is a Wintel server, such as a DL360, running RedHat Linux. I see from the documentation that RHEL (32-bit) is supported with the L700E, so that seems a viable option.

Has anybody experience of using Linux to control a library robot?

Also, can anybody tell me what the device will be on Linux (on the HP it's /dev/rac/c0t8d0)?

Thanks very much!

[Torsten.]

If HP-UX, why not a used rx1600 or rx1620 (1U), rx2620 (2U) as Itanium or rp3440 (2U) or an older rp24x0 (2U) as RISC based?

[CIBER Unix]

Yes - we looked for a used 1U Itanium machine - still generally more than a Wintel though.
It turns out that there was enough space to rack the old 11.0 machine, so it'll probably stay in (unsupported).