Mid-Size Business Tape Library Suggestions?

MPankau asks: "My current company is quickly outgrowing our current tape library and I'm looking for some advice on where to start looking. We backup approximately 12TB of data per night with about 3TB of that going to a disk backup on an EMC Clarion CX600. We're primarily looking for something that will give us some room for growth and be cost effective. What tape formats and library solutions would Slashdot readers recommend? Also, are there any other data backup solutions out there that may be better than tape?"

Comments

Call EMC back, write another check

[Gothmolly]

Seriously. Yes, you could cobble something together with 'tar' (this is afterall Slashdot). You already have EMC gear. Buy more. That's what they DO. Your company does $FOO, EMC does storage. They would buy $FOO from you, since its not what they DO.

Re:Call EMC back, write another check

[Wayne247]

Given that they already do business with EMC, the fact that the author states they want to keep "cost effective" might mean that they already ruled out more-EMC as being too expensive.

Or they're just too cheap to do it, and turn to slashdot for a quick fix that will probably not do it.

Depends on what you need...

[sirwired]

How much of that data is simple backup, and how much goes off-site for long-term archiving? For on-site backup, Virtual Tape Libraries going to dirt-cheap SATA arrays are becoming rather interesting and useful choices.

For off-site archiving, you really need tape. There are any number of expandable libraries available from any number of vendors. Personally, I am most familiar with the IBM 3584. This can be expanded to a rather large number of drives and slots, and the LTO drives it usually is equipped with are pretty darn solid. (And the 3592 drives you can buy if you have a LOT of money even more so.)

What you REALLY need to pay attention to when building a tape backup solution (which most customers ignore), is environmental and storage conditions, for both your data center and your off-site storage (if any). I think this is a far more important thing to focus on than what brand of library or drive you purchase. Pay VERY close attention to the data sheets for the tapes and drives. Tape can be easily fouled by humidity that is too low (static), or too high (sticking). Same goes with temperature. Stacking the tapes improperly can result in edge tracking issues, which in turn causes little bits of tape to fly around your drive when the drives rollers break them off when shoving the badly-tracked tape at high speeds past the heads.

For software, again, you have a lot of choices. On one hand, you have "traditional" backup applications like Veritas and Legato. These perform your traditional full, differential, etc., backups. On the other end, you have full-fledged data management apps like IBM's TSM. TSM can be a pain to configure, but if done properly, it is very tape efficient, and it has great support for live DB backups, staged backups, file versioning, data expiration (as opposed to mere tape expiration), etc.

Good Luck,

SirWired

Re:Ultrium

[bernywork]

Depends on what your discount schedule is I guess..

I know for a fact that it costs me 20% less to buy HP than IBM because of my discount schedule with my reseller. On top of which I also get a great deal on support, 3 year 24x7x6 warranties cost me next to nothing with HP compared with IBM.