I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now and I decided to pull the trigger on a tape library. It’s been sitting on a shelf at my Uni’s surplus store for months now and I’ve decided to try and put it to use!

I now own an Overland Storage Neo 2000e LTO 4 tape library with dual fiber channel tape drives! This thing is a bit of a monster at 4U and has room for up to 30 tapes with the option of either 0, 1, or 15 mail slots. Both drives are LTO 4 with fiber channel connections which should integrate nicely into my fiber channel network.

I haven’t quite figured out how to actually get connected to it and perform backups to it yet, but that will come when I actually have some time to throw at it. As of right now I don’t really have any backups and no disaster recovery plan so I’m looking forward to getting this setup and changing that! All in all it seemed like an excellent deal at $50 and with LTO 4 tapes so cheap I think this should be a nice economic backup solution.

Some pictures:

In other news in the lab I also managed to snag a Force10 SA-01-GE-48T switch for about $70. I’ve been starting to feel pretty cramped for gigabit ports lately with the cloud deployment taking up 2 of my 8 port switches so this will be an awesome upgrade.

I’ve got a few posts pending on the OpenStack front about finishing up the core services so hopefully I’ll get those finished up soon.

Catch you later!