Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linux-based Solution for Massive Tape Library?

Posted by Cliff on from the expensive-tape-solutions dept.

Charlie Zender asks: "The Earth System Science department at the University of California at Irvine is proposing to buy a 5--50 Tb DLT tape archive system to manage satellite and model-generated data. This will allow us to integrate the data we need for studies of climate and climate change. We all use Linux, and are wondering if there is a Linux-based solution? Vendors like StorageTek charge ~$250k for a solution based on their proprietary hardware and software. It seems like a Linux consulting company could beat this price and still make a nice profit. The software must make the tape library accessible as "near-line" storage and make transferring the tape to the disk transparent to the user. "

1 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. Roll your own by tallpaul · · Score: 2

    I think you are definitely in the realm of if you want it, make it! As far as I know, there is no complete open source solution out there, but it doesn't seem like it will be long before there is. Everyone I know has been pretty unhappy with Legato and various other proprietery and *hideously* expensive solutions.

    If you are considering rolling your own, try NDMP, which is actually a protocol (client/server) designed for network backups, like a "super rmt." It seems like it was mostly developed by Network Appliance for their boxen, but it is open source:
    http://www.ndmp.org

    It seems to be built around the premise that you will buy commercial software to use the NDMP interface provided by their servers. But an open source client/server is available which can build (easily!) under just about any UNIX.

    The stock ndmp client and server basically support dumping and restoring, but the API supports controlling a mechanical tape loader and someone has written an open source utility to manipulate a StorageTek loader (10 or 20 dlts). Not the same scale, I know but I would imagine that StorageTek uses the same command interface for all of their loaders. This utility is available from:
    http://now.netapp.com/download/tools/ndmputil
    You might have to register for a free login to get in there.

    Also, you can roll your own from scratch! Our StoragTek loader came with a pretty clearly documented manual, and all of the commands for moving the robot arm are simply SCSI commands sent over the SCSI bus. The linux SCSI API is probably "reasonably" easy to program to send arbitrary SCSI commands to arbitrary devices. I know that someone (somewhere) has implemented a Solaris utility (and I am almost certain it is open source) to manipulate the robot arm of a StoragTek via the Sun SCSI driver.

    I think that a *lot* of the robots out there are StorageTek too, just simply relabelled, but I'm pretty sure that most of the non-StorageTek ones (if there are any) also talk to the robot arm over the SCSI bus.

    Good luck!