Magnetic tape storage

Technology Workstations & Servers
1

How many here use magnetic tape storage? Think of DECtape, QIC, DLT/SDLT, DDS (DAT), Travan, AIT/SAIT, LTO Ultrium and so forth.

I myself have a good amount of DDS tape drives and a considerable pile of new tapes, DDS-1, DDS-2, DDS-3, DDS-4 and DDS-5 (or DAT-72). Besides that I also have an LTO-1 (full-height) and LTO-3 drives (half-height, also a full-height that I bought for € 50,- and which unfortunately broke not long after), with a considerable amount of tapes now.

Needless to say, I use tapes mostly under VMS, but also under UNIX/-derivatives like IRIX and Solaris. I even built-in a DDS-2 tape drive into a SPARCstation 5, with a customized bezel/facia (that I hand-crafted myself).

The only downside is that VMS and UNIX use radically different tape storage means and standards. So, you can’t just interchange just like that. On the other hand, the same goes for tapes prepared/used under Windows.

2

Via YouTube, by HP, a very interesting promotional video on why to choose for tape storage:

[CENTER][SIZE=“4”]«Backup to Tape or to USB Hard Disk Drive»[/SIZE] [SIZE=“1”][video][/SIZE][/CENTER]

3

Below is a selection of my humble collection of magnetic tape devices. Through direct (SCSI) paths, but also via TMSCP (10GbE, in my case; TMSCP is a great and very unique feature of OpenVMS, by the way).

$ SHOW DEVICES /FULL MK

Magtape ALBOIN$MKB300:, device type HP DAT160, is online, file-oriented device,
    served to cluster via TMSCP Server, error logging is enabled, controller
    supports compaction (compaction  disabled), device supports fastskip (per_io
    .

    Error count                    0    Operations completed                  0
    Owner process                 ""    Owner UIC                      [SYSTEM]
    Owner process ID        00000000    Dev Prot            S:RWPL,O:RWPL,G:R,W
    Reference count                0    Default buffer size                2048
    Density                  default    Format                        Normal-11

  Volume status:  no-unload on dismount, position lost, odd parity.

Magtape ALBOIN$MKB400:, device type HP Ultrium 3-SCSI, is online, file-oriented
    device, served to cluster via TMSCP Server, error logging is enabled,
    controller supports compaction (compaction  disabled), device supports
    fastskip (per_io).

    Error count                    0    Operations completed                 46
    Owner process                 ""    Owner UIC                      [SYSTEM]
    Owner process ID        00000000    Dev Prot            S:RWPL,O:RWPL,G:R,W
    Reference count                0    Default buffer size                 512
    Density                  default    Format                        Normal-11

  Volume status:  no-unload on dismount, beginning-of-tape, odd parity.

Magtape ALBOIN$MKD0:, device type COMPAQ SDT-10000, is online, file-oriented
    device, served to cluster via TMSCP Server, error logging is enabled,
    controller supports compaction (compaction  disabled), device supports
    fastskip (per_io).

    Error count                    1    Operations completed                  0
    Owner process                 ""    Owner UIC                      [SYSTEM]
    Owner process ID        00000000    Dev Prot            S:RWPL,O:RWPL,G:R,W
    Reference count                0    Default buffer size                2048
    Density                  default    Format                        Normal-11

  Volume status:  no-unload on dismount, position lost, odd parity.

Magtape ALBOIN$MKD300:, device type HP C7438A, is online, file-oriented device,
    served to cluster via TMSCP Server, error logging is enabled, controller
    supports compaction (compaction  disabled), device supports fastskip (per_io
    .

    Error count                    1    Operations completed                  0
    Owner process                 ""    Owner UIC                      [SYSTEM]
    Owner process ID        00000000    Dev Prot            S:RWPL,O:RWPL,G:R,W
    Reference count                0    Default buffer size                2048
    Density                  default    Format                        Normal-11

  Volume status:  no-unload on dismount, position lost, odd parity.

The bottom two, in the list, are 4 mm tape drives: a Compaq DAT40/DDS-4 and an HP DAT72/DDS-5. (The HP DAT160/DDS-6, in the top, is 8 mm and the other one is obviously an HP Ultrium LTO-3.)

All are provided by and available to the Winnili cluster nodes, as you can see.