John R Pierce wrote:
Aron.Darling@Emulex.Com wrote:
Loader are totally a love/hate relationship. They do make life a lot easier as they do the tape movements for you which can be a tedious thing at times. With a loader or library you can script the entire operation with tar, MTX and MT and let cron do all the work for you. Always look for the OEM rather than buying the name brand equipment, they are most always the same HW and FW with a different model number in it.
otoh, its hard to beat a 3 year warranty and on location support from the same vendor as your server hardware, assuming your a brand name shop in the first place.... hugely reduces finger pointing when there's a complex issue to resolve. with OEM hardware bought on the whitebox market, you're often faced with replace or self-repair option at cost.
Having used a 20 tape library, and suffering through restores with AIT2 tapes taking 10-12 hours per tape, I gave up on them. I went with good old rsync, and built up a 4 TB system to handle backups. Once configured, it's nearly a 100% hands off solution. You can read about what I've done here: http://marks-tech-pages.blogspot.com Works great especially for TBs of data that needs to be backed up every day.
HTH
Mark Schoonover IS Manager American Geotechnical - California, Nevada and Arizona V-> 858.450.4040 F-> 714.685.3909 C-> 858.472.3816 "Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end." -- Stephen Hawking
Mark Schoonover wrote:
John R Pierce wrote:
Aron.Darling@Emulex.Com wrote:
Loader are totally a love/hate relationship. They do make life a lot easier as they do the tape movements for you which can be a tedious thing at times. With a loader or library you can script the entire operation with tar, MTX and MT and let cron do all the work for you. Always look for the OEM rather than buying the name brand equipment, they are most always the same HW and FW with a different model number in it.
otoh, its hard to beat a 3 year warranty and on location support from the same vendor as your server hardware, assuming your a brand name shop in the first place.... hugely reduces finger pointing when there's a complex issue to resolve. with OEM hardware bought on the whitebox market, you're often faced with replace or self-repair option at cost.
Having used a 20 tape library, and suffering through restores with AIT2 tapes taking 10-12 hours per tape, I gave up on them. I went with good old rsync, and built up a 4 TB system to handle backups. Once configured, it's nearly a 100% hands off solution. You can read about what I've done here: http://marks-tech-pages.blogspot.com Works great especially for TBs of data that needs to be backed up every day.
If you want something that stores the backups much more efficiently (with a price in processing to do it), look at backuppc: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
It compresses everything and hardlinks all duplicates so you can keep about 10x what you'd expect online, and it has a nice web interface for browsing the backups and doing restores.
On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 at 10:07pm, Mark Schoonover wrote
Having used a 20 tape library, and suffering through restores with AIT2 tapes taking 10-12 hours per tape, I gave up on them. I went with good old
One of the lovely bits about LTO3 -- 400GB native, 80MB/s => restore a whole tape in under 2 hours.
Mark Schoonover wrote:
Having used a 20 tape library, and suffering through restores with AIT2 tapes taking 10-12 hours per tape, I gave up on them.
AIT is a helical scan format based on 8mm video tape, and is quite slow, LTO is a 'serpentine' linear format.
i've had to do very few restores from our LTO-2 system in my lab at work. Let me see how this works, I'll do a trial restore to a scratch folder of a few dozen gigabytes.
fyi, its on a windows 2003 server, and I'm using the HP Data Protector Express software that came with the tape drive (a little klunky in the GUI, but very functional for me so far), so this won't be directly comparable to whatever Linux backup software someone might be using, but its indicative of the hardware performance, at least. I'm writing the restore to a 4 x 73GB SCSI raid3 (HP SmartArray something-or-the-other thats built into a DL380G4)
ok, its restored 20GB so far in 30 minutes, so 40GB/hour for LTO-2 looks good. thats about 18700 files in 8700 folders, btw. Yes, a full 400GB tape might take 10 hours at this rate. thats quite a lot of files. LTO3 is nearly twice as fast, but then you could start getting into disk file system performance limitations
-
John R Pierce -
Joshua Baker-LePain -
Les Mikesell -
Mark Schoonover