Ok I am trying not to vent. When I set up this blog I wanted to approach issue of technology in libraries objectively.

But I have had it with our III system. We purchaed our III server and system 2 years ago. Just this year we have expierenced a sudden rash of tape drive failures. We have gone through no less than 4 tape drives in one year. We have replace the hard drive, 2-3 scsi cables, and the modem. Still we have had multiple tape back up failures. I litterally replaced one tape drive only to learn that it was a bad tape drive. III sent us a bad tape drive. I could overlook this once, but this has happened with 3 other tape drives.

To make matters more frustrating, our III server is not in library. It is located in the data center of the institution. The data center is a 30 minute drive from main campus to a building that is a less than flourishing area of the city.

So you can understand my frustration when I am sent a new tape drive to replace the old and I drive 30 minutes (through an area where my Honda Civic looks like a Lexus) only to learn that the "new" tape drive doesn't work either. Thus dooming me to repeat the procedure 2-3 more times.

Well about 3 months ago we finally got our system up and running. (That was after one hard drive replacement, 4 tape drives, numerous scsi cables, and a new modem.) Guess what, early this week our freaking tape drive failed AGAIN!!!! And to make matters even more delightful our CPU is throwing out exception errors causing the server to go down.

This is all happening to a system that we pay for III for support and it is supposed to be a simple turnkey system. GOD it makes me shudder to think what would happen if we didn't pay for support.

So I have a question for anybody out there in library land who uses III. IS THIS NORMAL!?!??! Are other libraries having this much bad luck with their III system? Because honestly I am really getting seriously ticked off by their shoddy hardware.