Sun Microsystems SL8500 manual Electronics Control Module, LTO Ultrium, Super DLT, HBK Card

Drive and Electronics Module

LTO Ultrium

Ultrium Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology was developed jointly by Hewlett- Packard (HP), IBM, and Seagate to enable data interchange among different LTO Ultrium tape drive vendors. LTO is an “open format” technology, which means that users have multiple sources of product and media. The “open” nature of LTO technology enables compatibility between the three different vendors.

The SL8500 supports the Ultrium Generation 2 and 3 LTO drives available

from HP, IBM, and Quantum. These drives use a single reel data cartridge with native transfer rates and capacities of up to

■35MB/s with capacities of 200 GB for LTO2 drives

■80 MB/s with capacities of 300 GB for LTO3 drives

TABLE 1-3LTO Drive Backward Readability

	LTO Gen 2 Drive	LTO Gen 3 Drive
LTO 1 media	Read and write	Read only
LTO 2 media	Read and write	Read and write
LTO 3 media	No action	Read and write

Super DLT

The Super DLT (SDLT) is a standard for mid-range UNIX and Windows platforms. The SDLT 600 incorporates an advanced tape recording technology for high capacity tapes, up to 300 GB, with transfer rates of 36 MB/s.

Electronics Control Module

Each library contains an electronics control module.

HBK Card

The HBK card contains flash memory and feature upgrade controls; it resides on a separate logic card within the control module. It contains the configuration, firmware versions, and features for the library.

Configuration

Library configuration is retained on the flash memory card. This saves significant time in cases where an HBC card must be replaced, because the new card fetches the configuration from flash memory instead of requiring manual re-configuration by a service representative.

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