Guru's need help on STK T10000 tape drive problem

[Steve_forrester]

We are evaluating the Sun/STK T10k drive, the one that holds 500gb native.

Anyway can write to drive just fine however when ran a long job 1tb it filled the first tape at ~650gb then Veritas never called for next tape so job just died with a status code 25.

Background we are solaris 8 netbackup 6.0mp2

Opened a ticket with Veritas and they have not found a smoking gun.  Their only thought so far was to upgrade to mp4 and if that did not correct it then open a ticket at that point.

TIA

Steve

[DavidParker]

Steve,
MP4 seems to be the most stable release of 6.0 currently.
Sounds like their advise is right on the money!

[Stumpr2]

Steve,

Humor them and load MP4. It is easy to load and will not take much time. You will definitely want 6.0 MP4 as your base load. might as well do your evaluating at that version.

[Chris_Colvin]

You might want to make sure that 6.0MP2 even supports the T10K.  I seem to remember we had to load 5.1MP 5 just to add support and that came out after 6.0MP2 iirc.  I agree with the MP4 or 5 suggestion.

The T10K is an excellent drive, I have 14 of them running 24x7.  My only complaint is that they seem to go down in NBU easily (6.5.0), but with firmware and driver updates, they've improved over the last year quite a bit.  I think my record is 2.7TB/tape with a 1.1TB/tape average on the 700TB we have stored on them so far.  I've actaully been able to max out the bandwith on a Cisco SAN switch moving data from media server DSSUs to T10K tape.  I'm the first person our Cisco engineer knows of who's pulled that off on a 9513 48 port card. 

[samagee]

Hi, I see that you have some experience with the T10k drives. Have you ever seen where new tapes have been frozen because it claims they have data on them? Is there some format that has to be done to these new tapes? Thank you.