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

You want this

[austad]

I have a Sony DMS-8400 petabyte storage array. It's about 3 years old and cost $1.2 million new. I'm no longer using it and it's not doing me any good. It seriously holds a full Petabyte of storage, 1000 terabytes. Drop me an email at austad( at ) signal15 dot com if you're intersted.

Re:You want this

[St. Arbirix]

Wow.

Where else does someone being helpful offer to sell you an unused something they paid $1.2 million for?

Re:Ultrium

[afabbro]

Ultrium, yes (perhaps - this is really a broad question). HP, no. There is no point in buying anything HP in storage these days because it's just rebadged equipment (disk, tape, etc.)...with a healthy premium for the HP logo.

The big three in enterprise-class tape library manufacturers are IBM, StorageTek (now part of Sun), and ADIC. Buy from one of them. Don't waste your time with HP.

My personal favorite are IBM's 3581/2/3/4 line. I've worked with all of them and they have some nice features...partitioning, WWN at the drive slot level rather than the drive, virtual I/O ejects, expandability by stacking on frames, highly-available pickers, multiple pickers for high-use environments, etc. Some of the other vendors are catching up, but that's the key...these are all features IBM had in the 3584 five years ago.

Re:AIT

[sirwired]

What makes me nervous about AIT is my lack of faith in Sony's commitment to the product. The predecessor to AIT, DTF was supposed to be Sony's long-term format, but they changed their minds, making any investments in the old format obsolete. (DTF used gigantic tapes, and Sony was right to change their minds, but that didn't help those with DTF libraries.)

You are tied to Sony drives, and since the form factor is not even close to LTO, DLT or 3590/3592, your selection of libraries is also limited.

SirWired

LTO and StorageTEK SL-500

[ayden]

I disagree strongly.

LTO3 is the way to go: 400 GB native 800 GB compressed.
http://www.lto-technology.com/

Look at the StorageTEK SL-500. The library is modular and can be expanded (up to 500 slots and 15 drives) as you requirements dictate.
http://www.storagetek.com/products/product_page228 3.html

I run our company HQ on 5 LTO2 drives in 142 slot library. Weekly full backups about 5 TB. Daily incremental backups take another 3-4 TB per week.

UDO Archive Appliance

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a UDO Archive Appliance?

It's "tiered" storage combining RAID and Ultra Density Optical 30GB disks (soon to be upgraded to 60BG). There is a range of Archive Appliances going from a few slots to over 600, from one internal UDO drive to about 8 or 10 IIRC.

The idea is, the Appliance appears on your network as conventional Network Attached Storagae using FTP, NFS or SAMBA (the RAID part). You put your files on the RAID and the files are migrated to the UDO disks (two copies) which can then be taken away and archived.

UDO disks are guaranteed to last at least 50 years. UDO2 will double the capacity of the disks to 60BG. They're in a 5.25" cartridge and data is written to both sides.

It has a nice web gui for administration and recovering archived data.

And best of all, it runs Linux :-)