Looking for real 1/2" mag tape driver

[Hamid Taghavi]

Help...

We have an application that writes directly to a 1/2" tape drive.  Up to
now we have used a Xylogics tape controller plugged into a VME bus slot
on a SUN server.  The controller provides a Pertec interface to the tape
drive.  We are transitioning our products to SPARCStations which do not
have a VME bus.  We need to support 1/2" tape drives on these machines.
The Obvious answer is to use a 1/2" tape drive with a SCSI interface...
But it turns out that not all the features and functions that are available
on the Pertec interface are are available over SCSI...
for example, from "man st":
     .
BUGS
     .
     SPARCstation 1 does not support ...
     ...,  nor  does  it  support 1/2" variable record length
     operations, record	space operations, or implied seeking.

We want a *real* start-stop-tape-driver that works over SCSI, *not* one
that makes a 1/2" drive look like a 1/4" streamer!

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Hamid Taghavi
hamid at optigfx.com
uunet!optigfx!hamid