Hard Drives Instead of Tapes?

An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware News weekly news letter has a very interesting article about Dr. Koch of Computertechnik AG who won the contract to build a RAID backup system for the University of Tübingen. Dr. Koch took several standard entry-level servers, such as the dual-Athlon MP, and add modern components and three large-caliber IDE-RAID controllers per computer, and a total of 576 x 160GB Drives."

Comments

Why not Quantum DX-30

[harmless_mammal]

Instead of building a giant kluge, why didn't they buy a few Quantum DX-30s? Each one only takes up 4U, holds 20 drives, and the internal software emulates a tape library so it easily integrates with enterprise backup software from Legato or Veritas. If your environment requires off-site storage, you could attach a tape library to clone the backups and then store the tapes off-site.

Re:Sound fine, but...

[Bonker]

As someone who works in IT in the financial industry, let me tell you a little bit of what kind of requirements we fulfill. First of all, every system is backed up on a regular basis. For critical systems (systems that handle account numbers in any way), that schedule is daily or even hourly.

All systems have live fail-overs. When not required by law, and they frequently are, such systems are required by the demands of profit. If financial transactions falter for a *second*, it means money lost.

Back-up media is triple redundant and incremental over 5 days. Backup irregularities of any kind are logged, investigated, and acted upon by at least 3 individuals.

Copies of backups are stored both on site and off-site in a secure location provided by our insurance provider. We make frequent trips to this secure location daily in order to deposit backups. These procedures are audited and reviewed on a regular basis by both internal auditors and regulatory board auditors.

Tape is just a little more reliable than IDE in this kind of situation. Tape is going to be more recoverable, even in case of a long drop or serious auto accident between point A and point B. If necessary, teap will also survive shipping better.

Sorry, guys. As reliable as IDE drives have become, they're just not as durable as a tape cartridge. With the sheer amount of backup we keep, it's also significantly cheaper.