Sounds like HSM (Score 1)

I have used STK's Near-line silos(6 connected together) on IBM's MVS, using ADSM and FDR/ABR. I have also used an IBM 3494 tape library with ADSM on AIX and an IBM 3570 SCSI media changer on AIX. STL's Near-line silos are awesome! With HSM disk files are migrated from disk to tape and when a user reads the file the file gets restored automatically without affecting their process. I know ADSM supports HSM on various UNIX platforms, but while there is a client for LINUX it is not supported and you would need the server version on Linux if that is where the tape devices are going to be. If IBM did put one out then the driver issue would probably be solved since ADSM Server comes with a large number of drivers to support it. If you are using a robot library then SCSI commands won't help much unless you are using a SCSI Media Changer, but if you are using a SMC then you are all set. But I have seen robot libraries use tcp/ip to communicate with the host that had the tape drives directly attached already via SCSI. Some libraries like STK's Near-line can use a large variety of tape devices that aren't limited to using SCSI to connect to the host. Another thing to consider is if you are looking to hook this up to a Linux server, is this going to be an x86 box? And if so how much data can it realistically move? I have found that if you want to get decent throughput on a SCSI tape device you can't put more than 2 per adapter and then there's your graphics card, networking, if you are using a lot of disk on the same box is it IDE or SCSI(another card). If you don't run out of slots or IRQs, there's still the issue that the PCI bus on a PC doesn't scale too well. I haven't seen any VLDBs on an x86 yet, though with Beowulf I am sure that is not an issue.