MPE systems will support LTO tape devices

May 2004

MPE systems will support LTO tape devices

HP 3000 sites have another reason to upgrade to more modern versions of MPE/iX. The later releases now support a later generation of backup devices.

At the Interex Solutions Symposium West, HP engineers confirmed that the HP 3000 servers will work with the Linear Tape Open backup systems. LTO offers more reliability and better capacity and performance than the DLT backup units which are in use at 3000 sites. Denys Beauchemin, chairman of the Interex board of directors, reported that virtual CSY reps at the Symposium said LTO and MPE can work together.

“I had the pleasure of talking with Jim Hawking, Kevin Cooper and also Mike Paivinen at the Solutions Symposium West,” Beauchemin said. “They confirmed that LTO was indeed supported on 7.0 with a patch, and also on 7.5. I was also told that TurboStore performed very badly with LTO devices. This is especially so during restores, with rates in the hundreds of bytes per second.” Beauchemin said the bottom line on using the LTO tape devices, which can offer up to 200Gb per tape capacity, is that “If you have a high-end, un-crippled N-Class box, are running something other than TurboStore and are on 7.5, you can use LTO drives.”