Market Research - ICT Infrastructure Support – Tape Library Review

The purpose of this market research questionnaire is to gather information on the supply and approximate/indicative costs of a new Tape Library for EAC. This will allow the client service to review any potential budget shortfall for the delivery of this future project.

East Ayrshire Council currently utilise two Quantum Scalar i500 Tape Libraries – one with 2 drives and one with 4 drives. This integrates easily with our disk backup enabling us to have a tiered storage architecture which backs up data to tape. The warranty expires on these in March and April 2022 respectively. The tape library drives are end of service life, therefore we cannot renew the support on these, so our choice is to renew the drives or else renew the whole tape library. In order to keep the support on the drives and the chassis as the one entity, we are seeking to replace the libraries.

We have 6 x LTO6 drives in total and approximately 1000 LTO6 tapes.

The aim of this project is to replace the tape libraries by consolidating them into the one library, and replace with one similar; we believe the Scalar i6 to be a direct replacement. This would mean less drives and only one library therefore less renewals in the future. We must maintain compatibility with our existing LTO6 tapes so that these can still be read and restored from whilst we wait for the retention periods to expire. We propose to do this by using a mix of LTO7 drives and LTO8 or LTO9 drives. The reason behind this is that LTO8/9 drives can only read back one generation, therefore we require the LTO7 drive to read our LTO6 tapes.