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IBM 3580

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 Huge headache getting an IBM 3580-L3H  LTO-3 drive to work. In a nutshell we have everything set up and configured properly in a completely supported environment and the backup speeds are terrible, around 6MiB/S for a normal batch of office documents. If you are interested in all this please feel free to contact me. I have been trying to get this to work since August of 2006. I am especially interested in others performance at this point.

Environment is an IBM x346 running Windows 2003 SBS SP2. The x346 is running the onboard HBA with ServeRAID-7k but we also have installed an Adaptec 29320LP for the drive.

If you follow the blogs at the left you can see the multitude of things but to summarize we have tried 3 different machines, 3 tape drives, 4 cables, 3 terminators, two backup apps, and a partridge in a pear tree. There is minor damage and associated blood stains on the facade of the machine do to the repetitive forehead contact. We do know that using a specialized app from IBM that does not use the driver or system HDD we see fast speeds. This proves the HBA, drive, and associated hardware are all OK. We also know that other OS's on other systems see good performance. I have not met anyone yet running the same OS that gets good drive performance. My suspicion at this point is that the driver is flawed in some way.

RSM* users beware! To install the drivers you must use the install.exe with the -n switch (install.exe -n). The install application used to ask users if they were using TSM or not and if you are not using TSM you need to add the -n switch. What's more this is not mentioned anywhere in the driver documentation.

Speaking of drivers the current version on the website 6.1.7.8 (as of 9/28/2007) has problems. We could not get it to work on two different machine and caused all kinds of errors. A new version 6.1.7.90 was created that solves the problem but the performance is still very slow. the .90 driver has not yet been released. 

*Removable Storage Manager, the built in media manager for Windows

Update:

Eventually a CritSit was issued and some big wheels got involved but it was to no benefit. In a nutshell IBM is not interested in supporting any Windows based systems unless you use their Tivoli backup product. They blamed small file sizes (anything less than a gig each) and NTBackup even though they could not substantiate the claim. What's more IBM development and support departments don not even have access to test systems for troubleshooting so all their advice and development is theoretical and speculation. They also stated clearly that although they say the environment is supported in their sales literature they make no guarantees as to performance. Personally I think if normal sized backup of typical office data is taking 20+ hours to perform that this does not constitute functionality but they disagree.
 
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