--On February 8, 2007 3:26:40 PM -0800 A R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi All, I have been tasked with updating my company's aging backup equipment. I am planning on purchasing a new server to run amanda along with a new robotic tape library with two LTO-3 drives. I just want to make sure that the hardware I have selected will work with amanda and the Linux distribution that I have selected for this project. I have about 10 TB of data to back up weekly. Here is what I have in mind: Server: OS: Debian Linux 2U - 6 SATA HD slots Pentium dual core processor (anyone have trouble with dual core?) 2GB RAM (too much? to little?) 2TB of HD spooling space, RAID0 w/four 500GB drives 120GB of operating system space on RAID1 with two 120GB drives LSI Logic LSI22320 Ultra320 SCSI Dual Channel PCIx card Loader: Overland ARCvault24 w/ two LTO-3 tape drives
I can't recommend LSI Logic SCSI cards. The drivers in atleast 2.6 Linux are pretty ugly. Lack error recovery requiring you to power down the machine if the card encounters a serious error (no, rmmod/modprobe is not enough I found out).
After having lots of issues with an LSI card replaced it with an Adaptec, very happy since. I can't recommend Adaptec's RAID cards though. Especially not the bastardizations they made out of the ICP Vortex cards (now ICP* models, not the older GDT* models).
AMANDA can use almost any changer, using chg-zd-mtx or chg-scsi. I use chg-zd-mtx which is basically a set of wrappers around mt and mtx -- mtx speaks the normal, standard SCSI changer protocol and I've actually yet to find a SCSI changer that you can't atleast do basic load, unload, and transfer operations with mtx. This includes weird beasts like SCSI CD-ROM changers.
And I don't believe with those SATA drives you'll be able to run the library even with one tape drive at full speed. LTO-3 peaks out at 80mbyte/sec....I see 60mbyte/sec routinely in production, currently my tape host can't keep up with that. SATA drives stream pretty well but AMANDA's spool area access resembles random I/O not really streaming I/O and it's really hard to keep tape drives fed at that rate. 10K rpm spindles might be able to even on SATA
I guess the main questions I'm trying to figure out are... Is this server appropriate for the task at hand and is the tape equipment that I have selected compatible with amanda? I tried calling Overland, but apparently they have never tested Amanda against the ARCvault, but it clearly works with the Powerloader without trouble. I see no mention of the ARCvault anywhere on this group, so I figured I'd ask and see if anyone out there has had any experience with that particular loader. Thank you very much for your time. ~Andy __________________________________________________ Looking for earth-friendly autos? Browse Top Cars by "Green Rating" at Yahoo! Autos' Green Center.
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