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

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: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.

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.