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Backing Up 100 Gigs in an Hour?
cybrthng asks: "I am faced with finding a backup solution capable of archiving to tape about 200 gigs of a financials data in a 2 hour window. I originally looked into DLT8000 Jukeboxes with 2-4 drives but have recently discovered the new LTO drives. I am interested in knowing real world experiences with these drives as there has to be a catch. I mean there is a 3 fold performance increase in data transfers, two fold increase in tape capacity and a minimal price increase overall. With these drastic differences is there something I'm giving up with LTO over DLT or vice versa? Which backup applications are more geared to handling volume and integrate with Oracle RDBMS? Restoring speed is even more critical then backup speed so i'm curious about how these two drives compare and which applications are best geared for this much data on a nightly bases. Mind you there will also be about 500 gigs of data in an end-of-week backup as well."
Backing to a stagging array and then moving to tape is a great idea. Backing up to HD means you only get to keep the last couple of back ups. The reason to use tape is to go way back in time. With a good grand father-father-son rotation, you can keep a lot of history with a reasonable amount of tapes. I have backups dating to my first week at this company several years ago. I can raise the dead from almost any 2 week checkpoint since then. I have had requests for e-mail that has been gone for 6 months and documents that have gone for more than 18 months. It makes you look really good to just smile a friendly smile when somebody asks sheepishly, "I need a file from an employee who quit last Easter. I'm not really sure what it was called, but I think I know where it was on the network. Can you help me?"
Floods, tornadoes, fires, etc happen. Sometimes people fly planes into buildings. When that happens, tapes are the only thing that keeps your business in business.
I know this is completely off topic, but sometimes tape just isn't cost effective, particularly when you figure in the costs of manually storing and maintaining a library of data tapes in a vault somewhere. (Most of that cost is in head count: you have to pay somebody to do that work, and that's not a $19,000 a year job.)
We're presently doing the cost analysis on a kind of radical idea. We're storing many terabytes of data in a data center in San Jose, California. The data center is as good as it can be, but there's still the danger (however unlikely) of earthquake or some other drastic event.
Rather than trying to back everything up to data tape, we've gotten pricing from a telco on a dark fiber link between the San Jose data center and another data center somewhere in Colorado-- can't remember where. Since we're already putting an HDS 9960 in the San Jose data center, we can put an identical one in Colorado and use the 9960's internal "NanoCopy" software to keep them in sync.
Believe it or not, it's working out to be more cost effective. One of the big reasons is that keeping that much tape on-line in a data center would require a StorageTek PowderHorn silo, and data center floor space is expensive. The difference in cost between the floor space and the dark fiber is so small that they cancel out.
Like I said, I realize this is light-years away from what the poster was originally asking about, but it's kinda neat nonetheless.