Which tape device is best?

[ilpadrino]

I have an HP 6-slot device that holds 6 dds-4 tapes. We approaching its capacity and I'm trying to find a replacemnt that will last longer than this one did. Does anyone have suggestions on good tape devices. I'm looking to backup 200 Gigs or more every night. Obviously speed is also important. Thanks in advance - prefer experience to plugs.

joe.

 

[davemak]

Question, have you ever used your backup tapes for recovery? We use dds-3 and dds-4 and they do seem error prone. Believe dds is more or less at the end of its life, unless someone know different? Where to next, 8mm based systems, DLT (which is also fast approaching end of life) and then there is LTO which as a company is what we have moved to. The latest version of LTO drives/tapes have a capacity of 200gb uncompressed we use the previous version 100gb tapes in conjunction with TSM and reguarly see capacities well above 200gb per tape. LTO has the fastest of transfer rates but this will be dependant on the system you are connecting to and the ability of your backup system. LTO works best when 'streaming' data does not like stop/start processing. Whatever you choose will be incompatatble with your existing system.

 

[ilpadrino]

Yes, the dds has worked ok for recovery. Right now the tape device is connected by external SCSI cable. I can finish apporximately 130 Gigs of backup on 5 NT servers and 2 NAS devices in 13-14 hours, but the verify takes another 10 hours. (We use Veritas).

What would I need for LTO?

 

[davemak]

LTO is a standard set by HP, IBM and Seagate so you can buy whichever size of device best suits you, think Seagate do more of the low end libraries i.e 1 or 2 drives, 10 tape slots. These would/should work with all major backup/restore products including veritas, in theory it should just be a direct replacement of your existing unit plus some changes within veritas to accept it, as i do not have veritas experience i cannot help you further on that side. Why do you have to verify the tape? Something I have not heard of for a long time when tape devices were unreliable, we certainly do not do that with TSM. If you need further info, will help where i can.

 

[gwichman]

LTO and DLT are both a lot faster and have greater capacity then dds. But they are also more expensive. The drives themselves can run around $3000-5000 and with an autochanger even more. If this is within your budget great.. Either would be a good choice.

DLTIV (also known as DLT 8000) has a capacity of 40/80 and does about 6/12MBsec uncompressed/compressed transfer rate

SDLT (the newest generation of DLT) has a capacity of 120/240 and claims 16MB/s compressed transfer rate

LTO has a capacity of 100/200 and claims 20MB/s compressed transfer rate

Both LTO and SDLT i believe have a newer generate in the works that effectively double those capacities. Currently media for SDLT and LTO runs around $70-120 depending on where you buy from and in what bulk.

dave - the verify feature on backupexec just reads the data you backed up and verifies the data was written correctly. It's almost like backing it up again as you can see by his timelines posted. IMO a feature of questionable use..

 

[digitalmaster]

our backup software is written by us but we have one site with 20 Sony AIT-1 drives backing up 40GB per day each. These have been running for the last 3 years very reliably with only the odd tape media fault and a couple of drives returned under warranty.

Media is only £35 and there is now the AIT-2 drive out which is backwardly compatible.

I have no experience with "juke Box" versions or autoloaders.