Request info on 8mm tape drives

[Viktor Dukhovni]

(E. Scott Menter) writes:
>Hi.  There is already a wealth of information on 8mm drives in the Sun
>Spots archives;  I forget what it's listed under.  I suspect that wnl will
>put his two cents in right about here -> [[ Oh, alright.  I think you are
...
>drive.  That is stored under "sun-spots" as "Exabyte.replies".  It is only
...
>"archive-server at rice.edu".  --wnl ]]
>

Don't forget the great review by  George Goble,  occupying the whole of
v7n46.  

>As for my experience, I bought 3 Delta Microsystems units from a company
...
>However, the 2 of the units were DOA  and the third rapidly fell way out
>of spec with regard to errors.  Delta was very helpful during this time
>and shipped me new units, which seem to be a little flaky, but generally

I also have heard only good things about Delta,  however the Delta unit
runs off the Sun internal SCSI host adaptor,  I do not have any machines
with SUN supplied SCSI drives.  I chose to look for a product driven by
the Ciprico 3500 SCSI host adapter, at around $1500 quite a steal.

I found the Perfect source!  

	Peter H. Berens, Apunix, apunix!phb at ucsd.edu, (619)484-0074

He ships a 3500 + Exabyte at just over $5000 for the whole package,
including positively the best documentation I have ever seen for any
software or hardware product.  His own drivers for 3.X and 4.0 Sun3 and
Sparc.  (these do work!  Testted on 3/180, 3/280 3.X  and 4/280 4.0 )
There is an automatic installation script for the driver.  Just run it,
it will build a new kernel,  save all changed files for deinstallation,
and optionally even boot the new OS!

How about that for ease of installation!  

>The software was a little disappointing.  The backup software is barely
>beta test.  The other stuff, and the device drivers, seem to perform
>pretty well, however.

The Apunix network backup software works like a charm.  All one has to do
is follow the installation intructions and define REL4 in one file if
needed.

As shipped this will dump file systems from specified hosts onto the tape
from cron every night,  or can be scheduled manually if you prefer.

I wanted to be able to leave a tape in the drive and append incrementals
until I insert a new tape and restart with level 0.  This made it
desirable to keep a Table of contents in the first file on the tape.  I
got driver updates to allow me to do this within 2 days of the request.
(These will I presume be in all future releases of the driver!).

So now a have an Exabyte backing up my whole network on daily basis,
without even having to change tapes more than once a week, and the
software detects that I have changed tapes,  does full backups of
everything,  and commences level 1 backups until the next tape change.

Life could not be rosier.

The Apunix driver supports BOTH fixed and variable width blocks,  will
read any tape in variable mode,  so fixed is only useful if you distribute
software on 8mm tapes.  You can also enable P5 tape support in the driver
if you need it.

A tape status program is included!

( It reports on the ECC count tape left, tape type etc. )