APUNIX Exabyte Tape systems

[Neil Ostroff]

In >X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 301, message 6 of 9
leonh%hhb at princeton.edu (leon howorth) writes: 

>I would appreciate receiving comments from anyone out there who has been
>using Exabyte Tape systems sold by Apunix Computer Services of San Diego.
>I would also appreciate comments regarding their "Multiple Dump Control
>Program"

I recently purchased an exabyte drive from Artecon and related software
from Apunix (because the Artecon exabyte drive does not include software)
for a Sun 4/280 (SunOs 4.0.1).  The software included an excellent exabyte
driver, a not-too useful dump control/tape positioning program, a terrific
tape status program, a very slow tape scan program, and a public domain
tape copy program.

Here's my 2 cents:

All exabyte drives are equal.  The only differences are in packaging,
price, delivery time, warrenty, documentation, and software.  I was very
interested in getting the exabyte driver software because the SunOs 4.0
and 4.0.1 scsi tape driver software does not fully support the exabyte
drive (e.g., status does not work, can't back space files and records,
can't forward space records).  The Apunix driver supports all of these
functions perfectly.  This was very important to me because I do 7 days of
unattended backups onto a single tape.  With the Sun scsi tape driver,
backups would be screwed up because of excessive errors, the tape is
removed and reinserted, a new tape is inserted, power to the tape drive
and/or CPU is lost, or a sytem reset occurs.  All this because I can't get
status.  As for the dump control program, it's basically a front end to
the normal Sun dump program.  I don't use it.  Instead, I modified their
software (source code is included) to do dumps very reliably.  The bad
news on the driver software is that it depends on Sun supplied scsi
software that may change in future releases of SunOs (unless you buy their
SCSI to VME adapter).

Neil Ostroff
Bell Communications Research  |  UUCP:  bcr!maestro!nao
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