News from iTech Solutions

Tape technology is always changing. We get faster tapes drives, drives that can write more to a tape, and tapes that can actually hold more information. Along with these great benefits are the issues of tape compatibility. "Will the tapes that I created 5 years ago be able to be read on our new tape drive?" Or a better question lately seems to be "Will the tapes that I created last week be able to be read on my new tape drive?" While designing new or replacement systems, you always need to examine the current tape technology. Sometimes on an older system, the customer might have 8MM, 3570, 3590, � inch, DAT, or even reel-to-reel. Many of our customers with smaller machines (150, 170, and 270 class machines) will have � inch technology tapes. Now, even these � inch tapes can be different formats like SLR-32, SLR60, SLR100, and then even older formats as well. While the larger tape formats can usually read the smaller formats, what happens when you want to change to a newer technology? In these instances, what is required in order to convert to a new machine?

Then we also have the LTO technology which is becoming the most prevalent tape technology on the IBM i. I think there are three reasons for this. First, it's relatively inexpensive for what you get. Second, it's very fast transfer rate. Third, it's capacity to hold information. An LTO-4 tape drive can hold 800GB uncompressed, and up to 1.6TB compressed. That is a huge amount of data. Compatibility with older LTO formats is also pretty good. For the LTO tape drives, you can always read and write to the current format and the previous format, but only read the two generations prior format. For example, if you are purchasing an LTO-4 tape drive, you can read and write LTO-4 and LTO-3 tape cartridges, but only read LTO-2 tape cartridges. So when we are designing a new system for a customer, we have to taken into consideration their current tape drive device and tape format, along with their future requirements. For instance, if a customer is currently using an LTO-2 internal tape on an old 9406 Power5 520, and we are designing a new 8203 Power6 one-core with an integrated SAS LTO-4 tape drive, there is no problem for the conversion. An LTO-4 tape drive can read and write to both LTO-3 and LTO-4 tapes, and read LTO-2. You would be required to purchase new tapes for your LTO-4 drive as you couldn't write to the LTO-2 tapes, but the new tapes could be LTO-3 or LTO-4. If you had an LTO-1 tape drive on the older Power5 520, we would have a problem during the conversion as the new LTO-4 tape drives can't read those older LTO-1 tapes.

Many times what we are currently seeing is that the customer has an external LTO-3 tape drive, and they are using LTO-3 tapes in the drive. They have purchased a large number of LTO-3 tapes for their backups, and the tapes aren't cheap (and the LTO-4 tapes are even more expensive). If we are replacing this with a new LTO-4 drive, we don't want the customer to have to spend more money just to purchase new LTO-4 tapes for the new tape drive when they have plenty of LTO-3 tapes. Instead we can save the customer money by allowing them to use their LTO-3 tapes in the new LTO-4 tape drives. However when they do need to purchase new tapes, it would be wise to get the LTO-4 tape media. One of the problems which develops when you have LTO-3 tapes in an LTO-4 tape drive is when a customer tries to initialize a tape, or they have a CL program that initializes a tape, the default on the INZTAP command is to initialize the tape as the format of the device. The command will fail when an LTO-3 tape is loaded into an LTO-4 tape drive in that case. To fix that, we change the default for the Density parameter on the INZTAP command from *DEVTYPE to *CTGTYPE. *CTGTYPE means cartridge type, and as long as the cartridge type is compatible with the tape (i.e. LTO-3 tape in an LTO-4 drive), the tape will format correctly.

CHGCMDDFT CMD(INZTAP) NEWDFT('DENSITY(*CTGTYPE)')

Now the customer is able to purchase the newer tape drive, but continue to use their previous generation tapes, without having the added expense of purchasing all new tapes. Best of all with this change, when the customer decides to purchase some new LTO-4 tapes, the tape drive will automatically format it correctly as an LTO-4 tape since the drive will know it's an LTO-4 cartridge.
Now what happens if you are using � inch tapes on your old machine, but wish to go with LTO-4 technology on your new machine? No problem, as iTech Solutions has the required hardware and skills to do the conversion for you. We backup the old machine on the � tape technology, and iTech Solutions will do a tape duplication for you to your new format. Then we can rebuild your current machine using the LT0-4.

Remember, the newer tape technologies are faster, more reliable, and denser. Even if you don't need a new machine, let iTech Solutions come in and analyze your backup and tape technology to improve your backup and piece of mind. I wouldn't want to rely on old tape technology to recover my system. I will leave you with this old joke. The new IT Manager comes into the computer room and asks the administrator "What tape technology are we using here?" The administrator responds "8 millimeter". The IT manager with a tilt of the head asks "What's that?" The administrator says "Write once, Read MAYBE". I hope your tape technology is more reliable than that! If not call iTech Solutions at 203-744-8954.