rackmount tape changers
We're looking at increasing our backup capacity, and I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations for a rackable tape changer, with about a 9 tape capacity (I'm thinking LTO tapes) and a SCSI interface. Anything at all would help; I'm especially interested in such devices that you are using in production with AMANDA, though. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://spacepants.org/jaq.gpg
Re: Sony_AIT_Library_LIB_D81_A3EU or other streamer
> We have several Sony AIT3 drives, and previously used Sony AIT2 drives.
> Only had one problem (one drive refused to eject a tape, had to get
> the drive replaced under warranty and got the tape back undamaged).
> I've never used Sony's changers, so I can't say anything about those
> (ours are Qualstars, never had a problem with them).
And though I haven't had any experience with AIT drives, I've been working
with a Sony changer for some time. Sony TSL-9000, 8-tape DDS-3 external.
It's been chugging away faithfully, writing to tape every day, for at
least 5 years now ('at least' because it was purchased and put in place
two network admins ago, so I don't have a really clear idea exactly when).
Glad I found Amanda for it, it had been working from a set of kludgey
scripts for years previously...
In our own search, and with feedback from the list, my manager and I are
thinking of LTO-2 for own own hardware upgrade. We have eyes currently on
IBM Ultrium tape drives, either the 3580 single-tape, or the 3581
auto-loader (as there's '-only- a $4k difference between the two' in the
words of my manager). I'm kinda pushing for the auto-loader myself, so I
can keep using Amanda (though I say it's 'for future capacity expansion
options,' of course. ;) ).
--
Daniel Bentley - Network Technician, QSI Corporation (www.qsicorp.com)
"Exploits care not whence the clicks come..."
Re: Sony_AIT_Library_LIB_D81_A3EU or other streamer
--On Wednesday, October 27, 2004 18:49:04 +0200 TheQL° <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > first of all thank you for your answer, helps a lot. > > Before I buy there is just one last question ;) > > On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 22:09:30 -0400, Jon LaBadie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Scsi tape drives are pretty uniform in their kernel requirements. >> It matters little, if at all, which drive/changer you select as >> far as the OS is concerned. > > So I take it Sony doesn't build weird whatsoever into their streamers, since this > link http://www.dealtime.co.uk/xPF-Sony_AIT_Library_LIB_D81_A3_LIBD81A3EU only > states Windows support. > > Is there anybody out there that could actually recommend this tape drive or say, > no, stop, it's crap buy Brand X Model Y? We have several Sony AIT3 drives, and previously used Sony AIT2 drives. Only had one problem (one drive refused to eject a tape, had to get the drive replaced under warranty and got the tape back undamaged). I've never used Sony's changers, so I can't say anything about those (ours are Qualstars, never had a problem with them). Sony does have Linux utilitites for their changers on their web site, so it's not MS only. You would have to see if their software is required or if you can just use mtx to control the changer. Don't forget you need SCSI tape, SCSI generic, and multiple LUN support in your kernel. Frank > > Thanx once again. Next time you hear from me is probably when I'm having problems > configuring amanda. > > -- > TheQL° -- Frank Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sr. Systems Administrator Voice: 512-374-4673 Hoover's Online Fax: 512-374-4501
Re: Sony_AIT_Library_LIB_D81_A3EU or other streamer
Hello, first of all thank you for your answer, helps a lot. Before I buy there is just one last question ;) On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 22:09:30 -0400, Jon LaBadie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Scsi tape drives are pretty uniform in their kernel requirements. It matters little, if at all, which drive/changer you select as far as the OS is concerned. So I take it Sony doesn't build weird whatsoever into their streamers, since this link http://www.dealtime.co.uk/xPF-Sony_AIT_Library_LIB_D81_A3_LIBD81A3EU only states Windows support. Is there anybody out there that could actually recommend this tape drive or say, no, stop, it's crap buy Brand X Model Y? Thanx once again. Next time you hear from me is probably when I'm having problems configuring amanda. -- TheQL°
Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
I'm going to work for the Protein Data Bank, and we're seriously talking about using 1 TB flash drives for backups in the not-too-distant future. It may take a few years to get down to a reasonable price point, however. --jonathan
Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
We recently upgraded from DLT8000. We choose SDLT320 and its working great. The primary reason for us was read compatability with our older archive tapes, and the cost was somewhat lower. Since we've only had the new changer for a couple of months, we can't attest to its reliability, but this is our third OverlandData unit and we've had very few problems. Joshua Baker-LePain wrote: On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 at 11:02am, Mike Brodbelt wrote So, does anyone have any suggestions, good (or bad) experiences, or other advice? Reliability is obviously by far the most important thing... I'm also curious as to whether people favour internal or external drives? I have both AIT and AIT3 drives here, and they are quite nice. While it's true that AIT is a Sony standard, they have a very long roadmap for it (through AIT6 IIRC), and it's not like Sony is going away any time soon. That being said, these days I may well lean towards LTO. I've heard very good things about the hardware compression in LTO drives. Regarding external vs. internal, I strongly prefer external. Tape drives can get hot. -- George Kelbley System Support Group Computer Science Department University of New Mexico 505-277-6502Fax: 505-277-6927
Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote: > Regarding external vs. internal, I strongly prefer external. Tape drives > can get hot. Additional upside is that if you need to power cycle the tape drive for whatever reason, you don't need to power cycle the entire server.
Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 at 11:02am, Mike Brodbelt wrote > So, does anyone have any suggestions, good (or bad) experiences, or > other advice? Reliability is obviously by far the most important > thing... I'm also curious as to whether people favour internal or > external drives? I have both AIT and AIT3 drives here, and they are quite nice. While it's true that AIT is a Sony standard, they have a very long roadmap for it (through AIT6 IIRC), and it's not like Sony is going away any time soon. That being said, these days I may well lean towards LTO. I've heard very good things about the hardware compression in LTO drives. Regarding external vs. internal, I strongly prefer external. Tape drives can get hot. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
Jean-Francois Malouin wrote: > I'm not sure what kind of box will have the tape drive but > it has to be able to sustain 15MBs for a LTO to stream which > is 3 times more than the DLT7000 you already have. Ah - forgot to stick the hardware specs in the original mail. It's a dual CPU AMD Athlon 2000+, with the Amanda holding partition on a RAID-5 array composed of 7 Maxtor Atlas 10k4 drives. Disk timings from hdparm are:- # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.47 seconds =272.34 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.57 seconds = 40.76 MB/sec Given that, I'm assuming that the IO bandwidth will be more than enough to run the drive in streaming mode without any trouble, as the backups run at night when system utilisation is fairly minimal anyway. > Just curious: > You say above that HP LTO/Ultrium is "too unreasonable for the 100Gb > native capacity"...Do you mean unreasonable in terms of $$$ ? I though I said "not too unreasonable" - I was actually quite favourably impressed with the cost, compared to SuperDLT. Subject to advice I get, I actually think I'm most likely to end up going for a 100Gb LTO drive. The 200Gb ones are quite expensive, as is SuperDLT, and AIT makes me twitchy as Sony and openness have never really gone together well. Thanks for the views though - that's 2/2 votes for LTO so far, which is a good sign :-). Mike.
Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
* Mike Brodbelt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [20041027 06:03]: > Hi, > > I've been using Amanda for ages, but the data volume I'm trying to back > up has grown, and I'm looking for a new tape drive. Currently, I'm using > an internal SCSI Quantum DLT7000, 35Gb native, with Amanda 2.4.2p2 on > Debian Woody. Filesystems are all XFS, backed up with xfsdump. > > The tape server machine is currently supposed to be backing up 3 other > machines, and that may grow to 4 in the near future. Largest single > filesystem is 70Gb (compressed image of this fs currently at 27Gb), and > I'm currently getting close to the tape capacity on occasions. I have > two Amanda configs - a weekly cycle with 15 tapes, and a yearly > "archive" cycle, with twelve, which gets all level 0 backups. This no > longer fits on the tape... > > I've had a brief look at various drives, and I'm basically considering > SuperDLT, LTO/Ultrium, or AIT. AIT seems the most cost effective, but > I've never been a great fan of Sony's "standards"... The HP Ultrium > drives seem not too unreasonable for the 100Gb native capacity, whereas > SuperDLT drives seem rather more pricey. Cost is an issue for us, so I'm > primarily looking at single drives rather than libraries. > > So, does anyone have any suggestions, good (or bad) experiences, or > other advice? Reliability is obviously by far the most important > thing... I'm also curious as to whether people favour internal or > external drives? I can't help you with external/internal drive but here's my experience: I have been using amanda over the years on different kind of hardware, 4mm DAT, Exabyte(s), DLT, Ecrix and LTO backing up SGIs Suns, Linux boxes and I'm quite glad to have moved to LTO. Right now I have 2 tape libraries, one with a single DLT that has worked flawlessly for more than 4 years except for a single tape failure (it will be phased out at the next failure) and another library with 8 LTO Seagate tape drives. Works fine except for one failure (2 days ago!) for one of the LTO drives. Bad luck? I don't know. I would tend to stay away from Ecrix -- very flacky in my experience but I might have been unlucky again. I've had the same feelings for AIT and I think I'm not alone sharing them! I've never had the opportunity to tinkle with SuperDLT so I'll make no further comment on it. I'm not sure what kind of box will have the tape drive but it has to be able to sustain 15MBs for a LTO to stream which is 3 times more than the DLT7000 you already have. Just curious: You say above that HP LTO/Ultrium is "too unreasonable for the 100Gb native capacity"...Do you mean unreasonable in terms of $$$ ? HTH, jf > > Any/all opinions would be much appreciated. > > Mike. --
Re: Laptop Backup Strategy
I'm beginning to investigate using external USB 2.0 / Firewire drives to do backups of some systems. The idea is that we could keep 2-3 spare PCs around, then if your computer is toast, we just ship it out for repairs, plug your external drive into one of the spare PCs, and rebuild the system from the external drive. --jonathan
Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
> So, does anyone have any suggestions, good (or bad) experiences, or > other advice? Reliability is obviously by far the most important > thing... I'm also curious as to whether people favour internal or > external drives? we moved from DDS4 to LTO when we outgrew our needs - IMHO LTO rocks and i can only see myself sticking with this standard as it moves on. As for drives we actually use External single drives and external autoloaders depending on location. The drive manufacturer is NEC which was a decision based on price but we have not been disappointed! thanks
Looking for tape drive suggestions
Hi, I've been using Amanda for ages, but the data volume I'm trying to back up has grown, and I'm looking for a new tape drive. Currently, I'm using an internal SCSI Quantum DLT7000, 35Gb native, with Amanda 2.4.2p2 on Debian Woody. Filesystems are all XFS, backed up with xfsdump. The tape server machine is currently supposed to be backing up 3 other machines, and that may grow to 4 in the near future. Largest single filesystem is 70Gb (compressed image of this fs currently at 27Gb), and I'm currently getting close to the tape capacity on occasions. I have two Amanda configs - a weekly cycle with 15 tapes, and a yearly "archive" cycle, with twelve, which gets all level 0 backups. This no longer fits on the tape... I've had a brief look at various drives, and I'm basically considering SuperDLT, LTO/Ultrium, or AIT. AIT seems the most cost effective, but I've never been a great fan of Sony's "standards"... The HP Ultrium drives seem not too unreasonable for the 100Gb native capacity, whereas SuperDLT drives seem rather more pricey. Cost is an issue for us, so I'm primarily looking at single drives rather than libraries. So, does anyone have any suggestions, good (or bad) experiences, or other advice? Reliability is obviously by far the most important thing... I'm also curious as to whether people favour internal or external drives? Any/all opinions would be much appreciated. Mike.
Re: amanda still doesn't have EOT properly?
Hello, on Wednesday, October 27, 2004 at 01:32) Frank Smith wrote: FS> --On Tuesday, October 26, 2004 15:09:21 -0700 Joe Rhett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> What I meant was: why does your statement differ so extremely from the >> documentation? Or am I misreading it? FS> The documentation you quoted seems to have come from the MULTITAPE FS> file in the Docs directory. The head othat file states: FS> MULTITAPE SUPPORT IN AMANDA 2.2 FS> Draft 1 - jds 3/29/94 FS> It is a proposal for future enhancements which have never been FS> implemented in the production release, although there are a few FS> people who have working patches to implement some of the proposed FS> featues (the tape-spanning of a single dump image, at least). Sorry for being that late on this thread, I am quite busy these days. It is true, this MULTITAPE-chapter is an outdated proposal. It describes how JDS wanted things to be. Read: FS> Specifically, I would like AMANDA to handle the following: ^ The placing of this chapter was wrong, I admit, it should go to the section where the outdated material is collected. The order of the chapters is a suggestion also, I have relisted the MULTITAPE-chapter into the "historical"-section. I will update the Online-html-docs and pdf as soon as I have heard your opinions on this (the historical chapters could also be removed completely, but I think they should stay in to be able to look things up ...) Thanks for digging that up. -- Regards, Stefan
Re: Laptop Backup Strategy
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Richard Karnesky wrote:
> 3. Force users to backup to a server
If you have sufficient spare diskspace, let the user rsync from time to time to
this space. Then let Amanda backup this space, together with the other machines
that are always available.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
Laptop Backup Strategy
I'd like to add several laptops to my current configuration. I was wondering what solutions people used for "transient" hosts. Ideally, the main backup configuration (which handles workstations) would run in the evening. The downside of this is that laptops are VERY rarely (if ever) on the network at this time. So some of the possible solutions: 1. Force users to occasionally leave their laptops on the network over night. Probably not going to happen. 2. Setup a second config, to be executed for only transient hosts during the work day. Is there a way to keep this on a holding disk & trick amanda into dumping it with the first config, so that I only use a single set of tapes? We have tapes that are somewhat large & somewhat expensive & it would be overly wastefull to use 2 tapes/day when 1 could be sufficient. It would also be a shame to maintain two indexes & figure out which to restore from. 3. Force users to backup to a server What do Windows & OS X users use for this? BackupPC? A tar or some proprietary backup format saved to a samba share? I was wondering which of these solutions (or others that I didn't think of and couldn't find in the list archives) people use & if there is any additional advice that could be useful. Thanks, Richard Karnesky
