Upgrade A4845A to DLT8000

[Andre Machado_1]

HI,

I have a A4845 Library with 10 Drives and 560 Slots.

Can I upgrade the DLT7000 drivers to DLT8000 drivers in this model.

Thank's

Andre Machado

[Brian M Rawlings · Accepted solution]

Andre: Yes, sort of. This STK (oem) library can support DLT8000 drives (HP P/N A5599A), along with LTO/Ultrium drives (which I would recommend, over the 8000s). The only problem is, there is not an upgrade P/N, or official program, which would swap out your DLT7000s in favor of DLT8000s, for some "delta" price.

You might consider adding the second drive tower, and then just adding DLT8000s as you grow. You'd want at least a pair, to start with, to allow reading at DLT8000 level even if a drive was down for the day.

You should contact your HP or STK sales rep, and work with them. If they're hungry, they'll make you some deal to buy back the existing 7000 drives, probably not for very much, but something beats nothing...

I'm curious why you would do this, however, since You'd only get 20% more per cartridge, and reduce backup times by about 20% as well.

If you're thinking of upgrading, however, the Ultrium offers ~3x the speed, and ~3x the storage per cartridge, over the DLT7000. You'd need to buy new media, of course, and you'd need to keep a couple of DLT7000 drives to read all the old backup tapes, if needed, but you could do that, buy five Ultrium drives, end up with drive slots free, and still run your backups in half the time (if tape is the bottleneck).

Five Ultium drives would not be cost as much as 10 DLT8000s, and would provide much more benefit. Anything you could get for 7 or 8 of your old DLT7000 in trade would just be that much sweeter.

Regards, --bmr

[Michael Tully]

The biggest drawback of changing from the existing DLT technology to LTO (ultrium) is of course the cost of replacing the media. If you can stick with the DLT8000 idea you can still utilise the existing media investment.

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hello,

I am sorry but I think this is wrong. The A4845A is an old STK tape library, which only took the DLT4000, DLT7000 and the STK 9840 drives. They got them obsolete for this reason actually; DLT8000 came out and they didn't support them.

DLT8000 and Ultrium (and 9840) are supported only on 10/180 and 20/700 drives (the new STK libraries).

At least, that was what partsurfer told me... I might be wrong.

HTH,
Vince

[Angus Crome]

I must concur with vincent. I too have an A4845A (currently transitioning to an IBM LTO library). We looked very hard at an upgrade path to the STK, however, given the cost and work involved, we opted to go with bigger/faster/cheaper. Anyway, what we found out is, STK will upgrade these (for HP) to use 8000 or LTO's, however, it is pretty costly, and the robot picker will have to be seriously recalibrated to allow for the LTO, since it slightly wider than a DLT. It also has the problem of the offset/canted devices (DLT7000).

They would not give us a fixed price, because it was a labor intensive job, that was not very well documented. It also would require new firmware to be written to support the different load times and positioning. In the end, we figured they were trying to make it as difficult as possible and went to another vendor.

In reference to LTO, definitely go this direction. It is much faster, and extremely dense in data. We are extremely pleased with the reliability and performance increases.

[Jeffery Holder]

Can anyone tell me where I can find a W2K driver for the A4845 or even a generic driver that will work??

Thank You
Jeff Holder

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Jeffery,
as I remember DLT and LTO drives are not supported by w2k by default (only DATs are supported). So you need backup application: Omniback, ArcServe etc. Drivers are in backup application software package
Eugeny

[Adi_4]

I've also been unable to get A4845 working under W2K.

The DLT drives (8 x Quantum 7000) are not the problem - W2K loads drivers for them. It's the library itself that I am having hard time to get Windows 2000 to work with. It's properly connected; my backup software (Networker 6.1.x) even properly detects the library but can not configure it - it reports the problem with the driver on the OS level.

The question is - since it's no longer on the list of supported tape libraries, does HP even have the W2K driver for A4845?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.