Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
Jonathan Dill wrote: 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. Hmmm - that's a bit beyond my requirements :-). I heard a talk given by an ex-IBM'er some time ago, who worked with airline reservation systems. Apparently they never did backups, as they'd worked out that in the event of total data loss, the company would go bankrupt before the system could be restored, so it wasn't worth the bother. They were very keen on HA though... Mike.
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
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 $$$ ? HTH, jf Any/all opinions would be much appreciated. Mike. --
Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions
Jean-Francois Malouin wrote: I'm not sure what kind of box will have the tape drive but it has to be able to sustain 15MBs for a LTO to stream which is 3 times more than the DLT7000 you already have. Ah - forgot to stick the hardware specs in the original mail. It's a dual CPU AMD Athlon 2000+, with the Amanda holding partition on a RAID-5 array composed of 7 Maxtor Atlas 10k4 drives. Disk timings from hdparm are:- # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.47 seconds =272.34 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.57 seconds = 40.76 MB/sec Given that, I'm assuming that the IO bandwidth will be more than enough to run the drive in streaming mode without any trouble, as the backups run at night when system utilisation is fairly minimal anyway. Just curious: You say above that HP LTO/Ultrium is too unreasonable for the 100Gb native capacity...Do you mean unreasonable in terms of $$$ ? 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
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
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
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
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
