Hardware Compatibility Question...
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 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 Have a burning question? Go to www.Answers.yahoo.com and get answers from real people who know.
Re: Hardware Compatibility Question...
On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 at 3:26pm, A R wrote 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 I've no experience with Debian, so I can't comment on that. Dual core works just fine. For future proofing and power reasons, I'd recommend either Core2 Duo or Xeon 51xx (or Opteron) over anything Pentium at this point, but that doesn't have too much to do with amanda (which doesn't use much CPU in generaal). Make sure your motherboard has enough PCI busses and bandwidth for all the traffic amanda will generate. 2GB RAM is plenty. How you set up your holding disk space depends on how you intend on running amanda. I run 2 simultaneous amdump's on my server (1 to each of the LTO3 drives in my Neo2K), and so I have 2 separate RAID0 arrays, each with 4 spindles. 4 spindles/array may be overkill, but disk is certainly not a bottleneck in my setup. Loader: Overland ARCvault24 w/ two LTO-3 tape drives I have both an AIT3 Powerloader and a LTO3 Neo2K working quite well with amanda. I see no reason why the ARCvault shouldn't work as well (although, admittedly, I haven't looked too hard at it)... After looking at the manual, I see that the robotics are on the same SCSI ID as the first drive, but a separate LUN. RH derived distros require an option in /etc/modprobe.conf to get that working. I'm not sure about Debian. One note -- a quick look at the ARCvault24 docs doesn't show details on the cabling for a 2 drive setup. To run both LTO3 drives at the same time, they *need* to be on their own SCSI channels. If you can't do that with the 24 and you need that capability, you may need to look at the Neo2K. Good luck. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
Re: Hardware Compatibility Question...
On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 03:26:40PM -0800, A R wrote: Hi All, I have been tasked with updating my company's aging backup equipment. ... Loader: Overland ARCvault24 w/ two LTO-3 tape drives I guess the main questions I'm trying to figure out are... ... 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. JB-L already gave a lot of good info. I'll just point out that for the changer/drive to work with amanda the drives need to be compatible with the mt program (almost a given) and the changer be compatible with the mtx program. Amanda does little more than use these programs for control functions and writes data to the drives. Overland may be able to confirm these more limited compatibilities. -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
Re: Hardware Compatibility Question...
--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/secI 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. -- Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds. -- Samuel Butler
Re: Hardware Compatibility Question...
--On February 9, 2007 10:11:23 AM -0500 Joshua Baker-LePain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have both an AIT3 Powerloader and a LTO3 Neo2K working quite well with amanda. I see no reason why the ARCvault shouldn't work as well (although, admittedly, I haven't looked too hard at it)... After looking at the manual, I see that the robotics are on the same SCSI ID as the first drive, but a separate LUN. RH derived distros require an option in /etc/modprobe.conf to get that working. I'm not sure about Debian. Debian probes LUNs by default. One note -- a quick look at the ARCvault24 docs doesn't show details on the cabling for a 2 drive setup. To run both LTO3 drives at the same time, they *need* to be on their own SCSI channels. If you can't do that with the 24 and you need that capability, you may need to look at the Neo2K. Good luck. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University -- Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds. -- Samuel Butler
Re: Hardware Compatibility Question...
On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 at 3:22pm, Michael Loftis wrote 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/secI 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 The first server I had my Neo2K library on had 4 7200 RPM SATA drives in a RAID0, and it could easily keep up with 1 amdump run to an LTO3 drive (I saw 60-70MB/s to the tape). I didn't get a 2 channel card until after I'd upgraded the server, so i don't know how well 4 spindles could've dealt w/ 2 simultaneous amdumps. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
Re: Hardware Compatibility Question...
On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 03:22:28PM -0700, Michael Loftis wrote: I can't recommend LSI Logic SCSI cards. The drivers in atleast 2.6 Linux are pretty ugly. on the (NetBSD) flip side, I've had better experience with the NCR/LSI (esiop) drivers than adaptec (ahc). the adaptec seems to give up pretty easily on errors, and while it doesn't panic the kernel, it goes comatose until a reboot. who else is still making SCSI chipsets these days? -- Aaron J. Grier | Not your ordinary poofy goof. | [EMAIL PROTECTED] silly brewer, saaz are for pils! -- virt
Re: Hardware Compatibility Question...
On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 at 5:25pm, Michael Loftis wrote The LSI cards I've seen recently, in Linux land, are usign the symbios drivers. Specifically the sym53c8xx_2 drivers in 2.6, and the sym53c8xx in 2.4, both equally bad. 2.6 Linux has other problems, like inabiltiy to Erm, all of the U320 LSI boards use the Fusion MPT drivers. change/set compression without a tape loaded, same problem if you issue a rewind or...i think anything other than a status command via mt to a tape drive, if there's no tape loaded it'll sit there forever, no CTRL+C response or anything. Might be debian specific, not really sure. Compression etc can be tied to devices with stinit. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
