Newly Acquired 9714 - What to do?

[texaslane]

My boss acquired a 9714 with six drives and capacity for 40 tapes. Since I sit closest to where he is storing the equipment, (this is the truth), he wants me to bring it to life. The problem is that I have no background with storage or for that matter servers. My background is network engineering.

My iniitial research on this tells me that it is a little late to bring this to life since it is EOL. My gut feeling is to sell it to someone for parts and use the proceeds to purchase a stackable solution. Someone suggested that I could re-use the robotics and the cartride carriers and upgrade the tape drive for higher capacity.

My Questions

I have seen 9714 equipment on Ebay for around $5,000 but that doesn't mean anyone's paying that for it.
Is there a value for this equipment? If so how much?

What are systems with 1TB - 3TB storage capabilities costing these days?

Is there any value in trying to re-use the robotics or is this just a waste of time and effort?

Well, as you can tell, I'm brand new to this so any informatoin would be greatly appreciated. .....TIA Lane

 

[adpwl1]

Well, the 9714 only supported DLT4000 and DLT7000 drives. Since you can no longer get STK to support that library, if you had to service it it would be a Time and materials service call ($$$$).

So, if you have 40 slots and DLT7000 drives, you can store about 1.4TB of data.

As for modular lib pricing. You can look at a STK L20 with 10 slots and 2 LTOG2 drive. This will 2TB of data. List is about $25k.