Exabyte tape drives

[Darrell R. Davis]

We are thinking about getting a large capacity tape drive to use for
data archiving and for system backups.  The network is rather small at
this time consisting of two Sparcstations and two SGI workstations.
We have three 1.2 Gig disks and a 760 that are creating problems for
backup on a 150 meg drive, plus we are collecting 3D NMR data sets
where single files are 100's of megs.  The 1.2 Gig disks are NFS
mounted on all all four systems.

The plan is to put an EXB-8200 tape drive on one of the Sparcs, this
is just for physical convenience as the Sparcs are in a community
area.  I would appreciate any comments as to potential problems/issues
with the EXB drive.  What software commands are available for the EXB
drive and how flexible is file handling with this command set? My
experience is that adding peripherals to an IRIS is generally a lot
easier than the equivalent operation on a Sun, does anyone have any
comments on this?  We are running Irix 3.3.2 and SunOS 4.0.3 but can
go to 4.1.X if we need to.


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 Darrell R. Davis 
 Medicinal Chemistry 
 University of Utah 
  
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