shoshana@pdi.UUCP (Shoshana Abrass) (01/29/91)
We're thinking of buying an optical disk 'jukebox' for our sgi's. So far
we've only found one vendor that has an sgi driver: Introl, which sells
two types of 10-disk systems, one which uses the Ricoh drive and one
which uses the Maxtor/Tahiti drive.
Does anyone have any experience with
1. The Tahiti r/w optical drive?
2. Introl's jukebox, either on an sgi or another unix machine?
3. Another company that has a jukebox with an sgi driver?
Other suggestions for how we could store 10 Gigabytes of data, cheaply,
are welcome! (the 10G jukebox is around $15k). I've heard that there
are good exabyte jukeboxes out there, but people want filesystem-type
access to data.
-shoshana
pdi!shoshana@sgi.com
...uunet!sgi!pdi!shoshana
---------------- Disclaimer necessitated by mailpath: -----------------
I don't work for sgi, I just work downstream.
------------------------------------------------------------------------olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) (01/29/91)
In <9101282258.AA11999@koko.pdi.com> shoshana@pdi.UUCP (Shoshana Abrass) writes: | We're thinking of buying an optical disk 'jukebox' for our sgi's. So far | we've only found one vendor that has an sgi driver: Introl, which sells | two types of 10-disk systems, one which uses the Ricoh drive and one | which uses the Maxtor/Tahiti drive. | | Does anyone have any experience with | 1. The Tahiti r/w optical drive? | 2. Introl's jukebox, either on an sgi or another unix machine? | 3. Another company that has a jukebox with an sgi driver? No comments on the jukebox itself, but the Maxtor Tahiti is one of the faster MO drives out there (at least on SGI systems). We measured about 490 Kbytes/sec sustainable on filesystem reads, and about 200 Kbytes/sec on writes (erase before write slows things down). It also as fairly fast access time (35 ms average, if I remember correctly). The drive itself (again, not jukeboxes) is software supported in 3.3, and we have an ongoing arrangement with Maxoptix/Storage Dimensions where they support the hardware and we support the software. Just be REAL careful to be sure they get adequate (and cool enough) airflow, or you have an expensive repair. This is true of most of the current high performance MO drives. Rumors are that future versions will be more heat tolerant. That said, they seem to be pretty reliable. I'm afraid I don't remember anything about the Ricoh drives. -- Dave Olson Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.
markb@Solbourne.COM (Mark Bradley) (01/30/91)
In article <9101282258.AA11999@koko.pdi.com> shoshana@pdi.UUCP (Shoshana Abrass) writes: > Looking for a jukebox MO. Won't LUN's need to be supported? Or are they hidden from the driver in another manner on those available today? markb -- Mark Bradley (DoD#1100) Faster, faster, until the thrill I/O Subsystems of speed overcomes the fear of death. Solbourne Computer, Inc. --Hunter S. Thompson
marks@pdi.UUCP (David Marks) (01/30/91)
I have received literature from Epoch Systems (Westborough Mass, 1-800-U.S.-EPOCH ) describing their optical jukebox system layered under an NFS server. Its a neat idea. The system is an intelligent file management system which keeps the most used files on magnetic media, and 'pages' it out to the read/write optical media as the files get older. Lots of HardDisk/ Optical configurations are available. Give these guys a call if you want some more info on the product. Dave Marks Rome Laboratory marks@aivax.radc.af.mil