Networker support for LTO4?

I thought Dell was the only one releasing them 10 days ago... what's the hurry? I would really love to see those tested first. Nevertheless, as with all previous LTO generations, you can set lower one and it will work fine. Encryption happens on HW level so it should not be something NW should know about.

Thanks for your quick response.

Dell was the first one, but IBM also announced LTO4 recently:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/newsticker/meldung/88874

Sun/Storagetek announced LTO4 for later this quarter:
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-04/sunflash.20070417.2.xml

Regarding your question "what's the hurry?"...
I'll have to decide between two offers in the next two weeks, Sun hardware with LTO3 or IBM hardware with LTO3 or LTO4.

The costs for buying new LTO3 or LTO4 are nearly the same. LTO4 would have the benefit of geeting a larger amount of saved data in the library at same amount of slots. So the next investment for backup hardware maybe would be later and my firm could save some money...
If we buy LTO3 now we also need a lot of new LTO3-tapes. We now have LTO2 tapes which has the half size of LTO3 tapes. If we buy LTO4 drives later that would also mean to buy new tapes again...

Best regards,
Otmar Meier

Let me just tell you one short story: I was at customer who went for LTO3 instead of LTO2 to address capacity. The issue was they could not feed those LTO3 drives and even with B2D option they still couldn't feed them all (but could use 2-3 disk devices at the time). 2 years after they have the same issue. More LTO3 drives have been replaced than those from LTO2, but I have no prove that is due to shoe shining. LTO4 is 800GB native which will probably hit 2-2.5TB per tape (with LTO2 I'm able to get up to 1.2TB). Speed is 120MB/s and with 2:1 compression 240MB/s. Can you feed that? OK, I assume this will be without encryption as with encryption I would assume we should see some speed drop. What I have seen with LTO3 and LTO4 is just one step forward is that you must also redesign your backup environment. You do not wish your whole incremental traffic from previous night to feed one or two tapes and then watch whole day while they are read and cloned. If I were you, I would keep LTO2 for primary copy while second one (or the one I would keep longer) would be on LTO3 or LTO4. If you keep only one copy or you have B2D2T setup, good luck. I know I would go crazy if one day Oracle DBA would start read operation from tape which hold 2TB of data with read of 20MB/s and on the same volume there would be data I need to restore and wait for him to finish (let's say 1TB).

I was faced with that decision last summer but it was more LTO3, LTO2, or SAIT5. The issue our VAR stated on why they preferred the SAIT5 was feeding the LTO3.

I went with the LTO3 in the end for several reasons. Sony's SAIT does not have the market momentum as does the LTO group. The LTO3 does not shoe-shine until around 37MB/sec. I felt we could stream above that with our high-end servers with LVD SCSI RAIDs.

So, in the end, we are able to feed two LTO3 drives at about 50 to 60MB/sec with peaks past 90MB/sec. With our date moving to a NAS, feeding LTO4s should not be a problem either.

In short, I was worried with my decision for the LTO3 for not in the end. Now, I would like to move to LTO4 drives and not pay the slot license upgrade, but LTO4 shifts to a thinner tape so I would like to see some reliability first before I jump.