braun@drivax.UUCP (Karl T. Braun (kral)) (07/09/90)
Greetings:
Just passing along some information for someone who might be in a similar
situation.
We have replaced our 11/780 running 4.3BSD unix with a microvax 3100 (sic)
running Ultrix. The biggest problem we have had so far was finding a 9 track
tape drive that would work the the SCSI bus on the 3100 (we have tons of
archives in 9 track format).
DEC has announced a new table top 9 track tape drive that would work with the
SCSI machines, but has been quite late in delivering. Combine that with
working with a brand new piece of hardware and the high cost, and I wasn't too
happy.
We have since created a work around: We also replaced out clustered 11/780's
running VMS with a dual hosted MV3400. This system does have a 9 track drive
(TU81+). We found we could use the VMS copy command with appropriate
parameters to MOUNT to copy the dump or tar image to a VMS disk file, then use
DECnet/Ultrix's dcp command to copy the image over to the Ultrix environment,
and unpack it from there. The ~$2K for DECnet/Ultrix will save us the cost
(what is it, ~$13K?) for the tape drive. This will allow us to get an 8MM
drive for the 3100 for our new archives, and still come in under budget, plus
decrease our tape budget for the coming year (8mm tape is an order of magnitude
less per megabyte than 8 track!).
If you need anymore details, feel free to write.
--
kral 408/647-6112 [Friends don't let friends use DOS]
{uunet|amdahl}!drivax!braun or braun%drivax@uunet.uu.net
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