Fred asks:
> Anybody knows the new 6250 bpi 1/2 Inch Tape drive solution?

Oops. :-)

> My HP 3000 Configuration Guide still shows the 7980S, but it is not on our
> price list and HP support states it is obsolete with an EOS date of April
> 2003.

Well, I suspect (but have no specific knowledge) that HP just obsoleted the
7980S at the natural point in that device's life cycle without noticing
that it may be the last supported device for the HP3000 capable of reading
an entire class of magnetic media.

Those who have reel tapes which they must keep for archival purposes beyond
2003, and who still expect to have 3000s then, might want to express this
need to HP before it's too late.

This is a classic recurring problem throughout the history of computing,
especially in business data processing where electronic records must often
be kept for seven years or more (up to something like 20 years in some
heavily regulated businesses I understand).  It's not hard to keep the
media around, but keeping a working tape drive along with a computer that
supports it is quite often nearly impossible or at least outrageously
expensive.

The obvious solution is to migrate your long term storage media forward
from something like 9-track reel-to-reel tape that's becoming obsolete
to something currently supported like DAT or especially DLT.

DLT appears to be a really good long term storage format.  A single
DLT IV tape in a DLT 7000 drive will hold up to 70GB (assuming 2:1
compression.  That's equal to around 1000 reel-to-reel tapes! (1200
foot, 6250 BPI, uncompressed = ~70MB/tape I think).  A DLT tape is
good for 30 years storage (or more if you actually keep them in a
controlled environment).

Now, what if you could actually put those 1000 reel tapes onto a single
DLT tape?

<plug alert>

One of the products that we sell here at Allegro is XOVER (pronounced
"crossover") which is an any media to any media MPE tape copier.  It
is able to make N reel store sets into M reel store sets, that is if
you have a 10 reel mag tape store set, you can copy it to a single DDS
tape rather than 10 DDS tapes (or vice versa).  Lots of people already
use this tool for migrating their archival storage from yesterday's
tape formats to today's (which are hopefully tomorrow's) new media.

In a forthcoming version of XOVER, we'll be supporting archiving of
multiple tape volume *sets* onto a single new tape set.

This means that you can take 1000 reels or so of 9-track tape out of
your tape library and actually put them onto a *single* DLT 7000 tape!

You can then make multiple copies of that one DLT and stick them away
for redundant long term storage.  Imagine being able to put a 10,000
tape library into a single small safe-deposit box at your bank, rather
than keeping them on site or paying an expensive records retention
service to protect them year after year.

You can even restore any file(s) from any tape-set on the DLT *without*
having to first extract the tape-set on to separate physical tapes.

So, if you've got a big library of archival tapes, and you'd like to
replace them with a shoebox full of DLTs, give us a call.

</plug>

G.