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.

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:You want this

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Watch it buddy, that's my wife you're talking about.

Depends on what you want to do

[Xross_Ied]

IF you want long term archiving, still need tape.

BUT IF you want weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly backups then a virtual tape library (VTL) is a better option. For most servers, the change in the dataset is small and gradual so a VTL stores one full compressed back + diffs for incremental/differential/full backups. Also, VTLs look for redundant data across servers; 10 similar linux servers will have the almost identical binaries.

I am currently looking at http://www.datadomain.com/ VTL to replace a 72 slot dual drive LTO 1st gen library.

A VTL costs a bit less than a regular tape library + all the tapes you need but the increased throughput and no more tape handling is what makes it worth it.

0.02cents.

Re:Depends on what you want to do

[ivan256]

VTLs are great, but...

It's hard for a small business to keep offsites with a VTL. For a big business with a dedicated circuit to a remote datacenter, it's just fine, but most companies can't afford that. He'll still need a tape solution. It would certainly be faster and cheaper to use the VTL for nightlies and only produce a single set of tapes per week though. It may even make a cheaper tape solution more tolerable.

If he doesn't care to continue using a legacy backup software package, then a VTL is useless, because there is no need to maintain the tape paradigm and the virtualization layer, and he could start using snapshoting instead.

Re:AIT

[fimbulvetr]

Actually, I'd agree with him for tape devices. Of all the mid-sized tape drives/changes I've ever dealt with, the AIT class has always won, no contest. Although data silos and other high end storage put them to shame in big-data environments, they are certainly not to be looked over in small to mid sized areas. I've ran every thing from DLTs to Travans to drives that aren't even around any more. The DLT drives I run, even with regular cleaning, need the drive replaced every 12-18 months and the tapes are only slightly better. I've taken over AIT2 drives that were a year old, and worked for the next 3. I've since left the company but recently visited and they were still using them. That's 5 years. Same drives. The AIT3 we purchased at that company is now about 3 years old. No problems there, either. I can't wait to start using an ait4. Awesome storage capabilites, excellent speed, good compression, amazingly reliable and not too expensive.

P.S. I also usually passionately dislike Sony.

Re:Do you really need TAPES?

[ivan256]

Yes, you really need tapes for archival backup.

The shelf life may be longer on hard drives, but the chance of the tape surviving the move to the offsite storage facility is way higher. The infrastructure for connecting a large number of hard drives (switch ports, backplanes, caddys, etc...) ends up costing more than the drive (BTW, 400GB drives cost between five and ten times more than an LTO2 tape), and the automation just doesn't exist (changer robots, barcoding, etc...).

Virtual tape is great, but it's not archival, and it's not offsite. If you're not already tied to tape and tape software, there is no point in using those solutions when you could do snapshotting or CDP instead.

Re:Ultrium

[emerrill]

Umm, thats GB, 800GB. It would be pretty useless at 800MB :)

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

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:Depends on what you need...

[The Blue Meanie]

Give the man a cigar (or a mod up if you happen to have the points).

I've been responsible for tape backups in most of the positions I've held over the last 12 years or so. I've worked with most of the major tape formats including QIC, 4mm DDS, 8mm, AIT, DLT, and LTO.

I'm currently using an IBM 3584 with 3xLTO2 drives. It's almost a pleasure to work with. It doesn't jam. It doesn't lose track of what tapes it has loaded. It's fairly fast. Every other autoloader I've ever worked with has been a pain. ESPECIALLY the DLT loaders. I don't think I've EVER seen a DLT drive last longer than a year before simply crapping out and needing to be replaced. I can count almost a dozen DLT drive failures I've had to cope with. I have yet - in 3 years of continuous use - to physically lose an LTO drive (although I admit all three of mine did lock up at one point due to a firmware bug).

I've also suffered with all of the major backup packages including ArcServe, BackupExec, NetBackup, Legato, and TSM. You know what I've discovered about choosing backup software? It's like picking who to vote for in an election. It's impossible to pick ANY of them based on any sort of positive criteria. You simply have to settle for the one that SUCKS the LEAST. And after being forced to use all of these packages, I can say without a doubt that TSM far and away sucks the least of all of them. You could not pay me enough to run a backup system based on NetBackup EVER again. I wouldn't trust it (or most of the other alleged "backup" systems) with data that had ANY value to me or my employer, whatsoever. I've seen more than one NetBackup installation simply implode, taking the entire catalog with it and needing to basically be rebuilt from scratch, having each and every tape in the inventory re-cataloged from beginning to end. And even when the catalog was still intact, I've had less than a 70% success rate in getting NetBackup to actually RESTORE something I needed restored. Almost a third of my attempts to get data back out of a NetBackup backup system resulted in random, unexplainable failures with cryptic numeric result codes that basically translated to "unknown internal error" according to the docs. On the other end of the spectrum, using TSM, I've successfully restored whole directory trees that were accidentally deleted in just a few minutes, whole Oracle databases that were damaged beyond recovery in a few hours, and I've done a bare-metal restore of both a complete Solaris server and a complete Novell server to a fully functional state in less than 4 hours each. Those last two were scheduled recovery exercises - I don't have ACTUAL failures that need restores very often. We have a bare-metal restore DR exercise for a Windows 2000 system scheduled for the early part of next month, and I expect it will work almost as easily as the other two.

Plus with TSM's Disaster Recovery Manager feature, offsite tape management is brain-dead simple. The system automatically keeps one copy of your data hot and ready in the tape changer on-site, so restores of accidentally deleted or corrupted files/databases can happen immediately, and another copy is fully maintained and rotated to offsite storage by the DRM for a disaster scenario in which the on-site equipment is destroyed. The daily outbound and call-back reports are generated automatically, and plugging them into the offsite storage company's infrastructure is pretty easy. All I usually have to do is take the tapes out of the changer, and put the call-backs in the changer when they're dropped off.

With my current 3584(LTO)/TSM setup, I can safely say - for the first time in over a *decade* of working as a system admin - that I am TOTALLY confident in my ability to restore our data center to 100% functionality in a total-loss scenario. I'd love to find out how many SysAdmins working with any other backup technology have that same level of confidence. I know I personally never had this level of confidence in my backups with any other backup software, and I was always at least a little concerned when using the other tape formats.

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.

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.

Re:Ultrium

[ayden]

There are 3 major manufacturers of LTO2 drives: HP, IBM and Quantum. HP actually makes the LTO2 drives in my StorageTEK SL-500. The company we acquired last September also uses STK libraries (L80, L40 and 3 L20's) all of which have HP drives.

LTO3 and STK L700

[dspyder]

We have an STK SL8500 loaded with various drives. For a medium-sized shop (12TB is quite a volume for a medium shop, btw) I would definitely recommend and L700 and a couple LTO3 drives. You can always connect a second library now or later. They have a new product, the L1400 that comes pre-configured with ACSLS built-in... might save you some time and energy if you have to mix backup environments.

    --D