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Poll: Your Enterprise backup method?

T

typhoon43

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 5, 2001
Messages
3,930
After reading about Bob's NASty little incident with the SNAP servers..


As the "new" admin to my company, I've been delegated the backup server and frankly I'm not impressed. We use an HP Surestore Ultrium Autoloader (6 tape changer) that is currently mated to an old HP Dual PII-400 machine. We do Differential Backups M, Wed, Thurs, Fr, Sat, and Sun, and a FULL backup on Tuesday nights. Currently there are 18 servers being backed up to tape. The problem is that as I keep adding new DC's to the network, and new servers that need backups, they are taking longer and longer. We start them at 9pm at night and lately they're not finishing until like 10am for the diffs, and like 4:30PM on the fulls :eek: My Boss /= happy about this. He tells me we blew like 15 grand on this autoloader and it should be backing up insanely fast. I'm seeing 1.5 gig differentials take 3 hours, and never the same box. Maybe the drive is failing?

In any case, I've been reading up on Disk-To-Tape setups where you grab a giant slew of IDE drives, cram them in a box, have the data sent there, a nd then the tape drive has all day (during production time) to back it all up.

Our network is ~25 servers, one mainframe, 215 user AD Domain. You think I can justify a "backup SAN" or "Disk to tape" box? I installed the newest Veritas (9.1) and it's still taken for-frickin' ever.

All 100 Base/T network with twin Catalyst 6509's (fiber linked), and all servers are on the same subnet. I can't figure it out.

Cliffs:
Our backups are running slow as hell
What do you guys do for a backup strategy at your work?

Thanks,
 
Your backup system is not adequate for your network, and it's growth. It's all about capacity planning.

You need something with multiple drives to split up the job and speed up the backup windows.

I am on an AIT3 library and can go up to 8 drives and 96 tapes on my library. I thought ahead when purchasing this unit ;)

I'm still not sold on the backup to disk units out there, it seems to be the cure all for shrinking backup windows. But business still relies on that piece of mind for off-site storage.
 
Originally posted by typhoon43
I installed the newest Veritas (9.1) and it's still taken for-frickin' ever.

All 100 Base/T network with twin Catalyst 6509's (fiber linked), and all servers are on the same subnet. I can't figure it out.
Click to expand...

If your pulling data from all servers across the 100BT network and trying to back up to a single tape drive, then the problem is not with the tape drive.

You would need to consider the following options:

1. use load balanced NICs to pull more data across the network.
2. Use multiple tape drives and stream jobs to both drives at the same time.
3. Upgrade the backbone of the server links to gigabit ethernet.

Without knowing more specifics about the environment, its a guessing game as to what would help shorten your backup window.
 
Hey I like option #3 :)

I failed to mention that all my servers are connected via a Netgear 7312 12 port Gb switch.
 
Vertitas by itself, has always been a slow tape backup system. I can't remember the version that we use on our 7 server system here, but god is it slow and annoying.

I wish someone would come out with an insanely fast large DVD disc backup system, cause im sick of tapes already...
 
Originally posted by IceWind
Vertitas by itself, has always been a slow tape backup system. I can't remember the version that we use on our 7 server system here, but god is it slow and annoying.

I wish someone would come out with an insanely fast large DVD disc backup system, cause im sick of tapes already...
Click to expand...


It's not the software, but the hardware. I've run both Arc Serve 2000, 9, and 11. I've also run Veritas 7.1 and up all are roughly the same although I prefer Veritas.

DVD-R libraries are something I looked into for nearline storage for TB's of data. They are very slow, and the price to performance ratio is not at all that great. Your better off with a NAS or DAS device. If you got the money, a SAN. But many NAS devices allow growth into a SAN (something that I am looking into currently) I think the last library I looked at from Pioneer was around $25k for less then 6TB.
 
I use tape only for off-site disaster recovery archival purposes. I have become a HUGE fan of standby servers and redundant cross-storage.

Why not back up your 25 servers TO EACH OTHER? Why have a single tape device, which, if it goes down, screws over your entire backup strategy?

Disk space is cheap. Cheaper than high-end tape backup these days. It's much faster, and has the tremendous advantage of being "live". A server goes down? No problem, remap a drive letter to the backup location while you recover, and your users can still work.

My backup strategy is a set of three re-cycled corporate p3-500's with new IDE drives in them.

- Qualm
 
Originally posted by SJConsultant
If your pulling data from all servers across the 100BT network and trying to back up to a single tape drive, then the problem is not with the tape drive.

You would need to consider the following options:

1. use load balanced NICs to pull more data across the network.
2. Use multiple tape drives and stream jobs to both drives at the same time.
3. Upgrade the backbone of the server links to gigabit ethernet.

Without knowing more specifics about the environment, its a guessing game as to what would help shorten your backup window.
Click to expand...

Ding Ding! We have a winner!! If you've got the budget to re-examine the backup solution like this, Then you've got the funds to help out the network backbone a bit. That ALONE will make a HUGE difference.

Next question. What's in the dually P2-400 server? Got a decent amount of memory? The backup speed deficit could be attributed to a combination of Lack of network bandwidth and/or lack of server resources. Without more detailed info, though, it's hard to do more than make a rough guess.
 
I use two HP Sure Store Auto-loader (8 40/80GB Tape drives) connected to two different WinXP machines running Veritas Backup Exec 9.0. The XP machines are P3 500's with 256MB of RAM and a 20GB ATA hard drive. The backup servers are connected to the network via full duplex Fast Ethernet. All of the servers being backed up are on gig copper into the backbone router.

I do an Incremental on M, Tu, W & Th. The full backup starts at 9PM Friday night and runs till about 3PM on Saturday.

Some of the backups take alot longer than I think they should. I just figured that it's either the SCSI card in the Backup Exec servers that is the bottleneck or the fact that I'm backing up "compressed" files on the Windows 2003 servers.


Incremental Backup (3GB) takes about three hours. (17MB per min) (Windows 2000/2003 Servers)

Full Backup (About 60GB) takes about 18 hours. (69MB per min) (Windows 2000/2003 Servers)


Incremental Backup (about 200MB) takes about 20 minutes. (18MB per min) (First Class Server)

Full Backup (About 12GB) takes about four hours. (57MB per min) (First Class Server)
 
I use two HP Sure Store Auto-loader (8 40/80GB Tape drives) connected to two different WinXP machines running Veritas Backup Exec 9.0.

...

Incremental Backup (3GB) takes about three hours. (17MB per min) (Windows 2000/2003 Servers)

Full Backup (About 60GB) takes about 18 hours. (69MB per min) (Windows 2000/2003 Servers)


Incremental Backup (about 200MB) takes about 20 minutes. (18MB per min) (First Class Server)

Full Backup (About 12GB) takes about four hours. (57MB per min) (First Class Server)
Click to expand...

See, this is what I just do not understand these days.

I can build an XP machine with i865 or i875 chipset motherboard, put a couple of 120gb SATA drives in there in RAID1 mode, and have a faster, more useful, better backup solution than all that stuff. FOR FAR LESS MONEY!

Add it up, you'll see.

- Qualm
 
Originally posted by Qualm
See, this is what I just do not understand these days.

I can build an XP machine with i865 or i875 chipset motherboard, put a couple of 120gb SATA drives in there in RAID1 mode, and have a faster, more useful, better backup solution than all that stuff. FOR FAR LESS MONEY!

Add it up, you'll see.

- Qualm
Click to expand...

It may be a cheaper solution, but unless you place those drives in *hot swappable removable* drive racks, they are worthless if the place catches on fire, has a flood, earthquake, etc.

The other catch to using HDDs is rotation of "media" in backups, can you really store a weeks worth of full, incremental and / or differential backups on one hard drive? Even if you could store a week, then if that hard drive goes bad, so does a weeks worth of backups.
 
it may be a cheaper solution, but unless you place those drives in *hot swappable removable* drive racks, they are worthless if the place catches on fire, has a flood, earthquake, etc.
Click to expand...

Frankly, so are most people's tape backup devices. Let's be honest, how many people actually take tapes home or send them home with someone on a nightly basis? We don't, we have a monthly offsite tape, which really ought to be weekly.

SATA RAID 1 is two mirrored drives. I don't even use that, what I use is 3 re-used P3-500's with two 80gb IDE drives each. Those are my storage servers. Every bit of our data and files is "backed up" in three places, not incremental, FULLY LIVE. So, there's no need for a rotation schedule, period. My "restore" procedure is re-mapping a drive letter in the domain login script, and having the user re-log. Compare that with a tape-based restore.

All of that put together cost less than 2x8 tape autoloaders and the tapes that go in them. Price it out, you'll see. You can even add a single-tape drive for offsite storage purposes.

In this age of dirt-cheap hard drive capacity, network admins really should re-evaluate the "backup means tape" dogma. Every single company with more than one server really ought to be adding more storage (drives) to each of their servers, and cross-storing their data redundantly.

- Qualm
 
Originally posted by Qualm
In this age of dirt-cheap hard drive capacity, network admins really should re-evaluate the "backup means tape" dogma. Every single company with more than one server really ought to be adding more storage (drives) to each of their servers, and cross-storing their data redundantly.
Click to expand...

It's all relative to the business environment and disaster recovery requirements. Futhermore, lower cost does not always equate to being better.
 
im sorry but tape drives have become obsolete and retarded

even large backup manufacturer's are devoloping what they call "MAID" arrays... basically like a giant tape library, but instead of tapes, they use HD's... in the exact ways that you can use tapes you can use hd's for cheaper and faster backups...

also tape and hd's suffer from the same issues.. tapes fail, tape drives fail... but hard-disks there is only one possible failure, the drive... if one drive fails your not at the mercy of not being able to access the other ones....

and why cant you do offsite storage with hard disks? they are about the same size as an average tape, and can store quite a bit of data that can be accessed quickly... what are we up to 300gb 7200rpm drives now?

thats gotta beat the pants off of tapes IMHO...

i still use a 10/20gb DLT drive to backup my website once a month or so... but i dont really care that much since its on a RAID1 and backed up on my personal machine also...

i know its hard to let go guys, but face it... tape drives are on the way out... they have been for a while now

even Quantum, the biggest tape manufacturer (ever?) is now moving twoards hard-disk backup systems...

http://www.quantum.com/am/products/eb/dx100/default.htm
Provides up to 2TB/hr throughput and scalable to 64TB* (raw) capacity. Ideal for large database backup (CRM/ERP) and large consolidated data center backup.
Click to expand...

lets see your tapes do that :p
 
Originally posted by FLECOM
im sorry but tape drives have become obsolete and retarded

even large backup manufacturer's are devoloping what they call "MAID" arrays... basically like a giant tape library, but instead of tapes, they use HD's... in the exact ways that you can use tapes you can use hd's for cheaper and faster backups...

also tape and hd's suffer from the same issues.. tapes fail, tape drives fail... but hard-disks there is only one possible failure, the drive... if one drive fails your not at the mercy of not being able to access the other ones....

and why cant you do offsite storage with hard disks? they are about the same size as an average tape, and can store quite a bit of data that can be accessed quickly... what are we up to 300gb 7200rpm drives now?
Click to expand...

I have clients that have tape backup, and a couple others that do disk to disk backup. It's all relative to what the business *needs*. There has to be a consideration of price, performance, and fulfilling business requirements.

While it's nice you guys and your jobs can spend thousands of dollars on equipment, that does not mean every one else can do the same.
 
You both have good points, but it boils down to the fact that each client is going to need a slightly different solution for their backup plan. For some it may be tape, others it may be HDD-based.

But personally, I'd have to agree w/ Qualm and Flecom, by and large tape-drives are going bye-bye. Really only good for one thing, off site backups. And if you do it right, you really don't need a tape for that either.
 
We use a simple setup here.

2 DLT-IV Drives, one on each server we need to backup
(Critical data is very small, so it works)

Plus I get to take the tapes home every night! Yay! (I have a shelf full of DLTs at home :/ )

Of course, one of our drives just shitted on us yesterday (some IC burned... the room was full of smoke and smelled to high hell)

So now we're without a fileserver backup.

Now to pitch the cost to our president.

(Hey, they won't spend $145 on a new UPS battery. What makes me think they'll spend close to 2G's on a new tape backup drive? I guess I'd better not tell them it's critical. Maybe I'll tell them it will make their internet faster)
 
2 DLT-IV Drives, one on each server we need to backup
(Critical data is very small, so it works)

Plus I get to take the tapes home every night! Yay! (I have a shelf full of DLTs at home :/ )

...

What makes me think they'll spend close to 2G's on a new tape backup drive?
Click to expand...

See, this is my whole point. Add up the original cost of all those DLT tapes sitting on your shelf at home and you'll see just how expensive tape backup solutions can get.

KaosDG, why not propose this instead: add an extra hard disk to each of your servers, use it to back up the other server. Then use the remaining working DLT drive to back up one server, which now contains data from both servers on its drives. You are now fully protected. For way less than 2G's.

- Qualm
 
Originally posted by Qualm
See, this is my whole point. Add up the original cost of all those DLT tapes sitting on your shelf at home and you'll see just how expensive tape backup solutions can get.

KaosDG, why not propose this instead: add an extra hard disk to each of your servers, use it to back up the other server. Then use the remaining working DLT drive to back up one server, which now contains data from both servers on its drives. You are now fully protected. For way less than 2G's.

- Qualm
Click to expand...

You're talkin' gibberish! [/quote from 'That Thing you do']

No can do on that one, at least not in the short-run I've had thinking of it. One server is already under heavy load, and the other one is "not-technically-ours-so-we-can't-do-much-to-it" type of thing. (it's a voice-mail server, that belongs to our contractor)

The backup for the VMServer is what we have running now, and the higher-ups don't want us to touch that one.

Adding a set of HDD's to our other servers means having to reconfigure the servers. That means downtime (although it can be done without much interruption) (These are basically glorified workstations... no RAID, or anything like that)

Downtime means our president gets his panties in a bunch and throws a temper tantrum because he could possibly lose out on a multi-million dollar deal :/

I hate that it's out of our hands right now, because I see so much Waste going on just in terms of infrastructure [we have 4 DS1's right now from 3 different providers... for that cost we could practically have a DS3 from one provider, but they don't go for it.... I recently replaced 4 Linksys switches, with "the same" linksys switches... because the linksys' failed... in effect spending 2x as much for the same crap... our firewall contract expired 2 years ago, and I got yelled at when some script kiddie found an exploit on the Fw.)

You see my dilemma.

I had already thought of doing server->disk->tape backup, since everyone and their mother complains about how "slow teh intarweb is" when the backups are running.
 
This may sound like a stupid question, but why is everyone complaining that the interweb is slow when backups are running? You aren't backing up data over WAN links are you?

Also, ease up on the boss for getting upset with downtime... if it really means the possibility of losing a $M deal, then you should care too... that deal is partly what pays for your paycheck as well =)

I use Veritas on my network and like it a lot. I use a combo of tape and drive backups... drives for the critical data, tape for the less critial data (tapes fail a lot more often than drives). 25 servers is too many to hook up to a SAN (the fibre HBAs are kinda expensive, as are the fabric switches), and I don't think it's necessary anyways. Perhaps you might think about putting another NIC in each of your servers and setting up a backup network in order to isolate your backup traffic from the production network. If you aren't backing up over WAN links, this might aleviate the "slow interweb" complaints. Also, I saw several comments about getting additional tape drives.... I agree with them. Tape drives are slow... no way around that. The only way to really add bandwidth is to add additional drives. I don't know the specifics of your autoloader, but many DLT autoloaders will accept up to two drive units... if yours does, this would be a fairly inexpensive way of upgrading your expensive autoloader.

As for the "I can build a better/cheaper/faster server for $xyz less..." We all can, but when businesses are concerned (i'm not talking the mom/pop small biz type), I would never ever try and sell my boss on a solution I made... why? Guess who gets stuck with support? What if the mobo dies from no fault of my own? Well, like it or not, you're guilty... the ability to point a finger at Dell or Compaq when the RAID controller dies is worth a few extra dollars... and when you have a good relationship with your account exec at Dell or wherever, you can get really good deals.
 
Originally posted by marshac
This may sound like a stupid question, but why is everyone complaining that the interweb is slow when backups are running? You aren't backing up data over WAN links are you?

Also, ease up on the boss for getting upset with downtime... if it really means the possibility of losing a $M deal, then you should care too... that deal is partly what pays for your paycheck as well =)
Click to expand...

They complain it's slow because it's slowing down the fileserver (well it was, before the tape drive went kaput)

Thing is they only know how to describe loading a powerpoint file or word doc as "the internet is slow!"

If you knew the president, you'd know how ridiculous this is.

There's inherent downtime involved with operating a network (especially something half-assed like this)

He doesn't just get upset, he gets stupid. When we had the blackout in august 03, he threatened to fire me because "the battery backups should keep the servers up and running"

Yeah, that's fine if we had a datacenter UPS system. but we have "SOHO style" APC's (1400XL's). Which gives us like 10 minutes to shut down.

Let alone the fact that the REST of the north-eastern US was out of power too...

but this thread is about backups and our methods. not my plight as a Net admin in a shitty business.

So I use Veritas.
 
Why are people relating this to home offices and computer geek solutions? This is a business class solution where tried and true rule. Tape and other forms of removable media are the defacto standard.

I admit to wasting a lot of tapes in a year but it's part of my yearly budget that I maintain in my department. I do have occasions where I've been asked to retrieve individual emails from 1999 from our older DAT tapes, or older AIT1 tapes. That is something that is invaluble in my environment and many others I've worked in.

Backup to HDD is nothing new, it's just being publicized more these days. I took a look at the technology, and it's worthless to me. Just because it's new and claims to be really fast. That doesn't make it overall better. You need to look into the pros and cons, and foget about what you would do but what the industry and large enterprises are doing. My tape drive I feel are more reliable then and HDD based backup. All of the components are modular and hot swappable.


So can we get back on topic here with an enterprise solution?
 
Well although we fork out for Plasma screens at every branch, our whole IT department just got Blackberry's, and we just bought a 400,000 dollar Alpha ES47 and 5 Poweredge 2650's, my Boss says that he spent way too much money on that Tape Drive just 1 year and half ago to justify getting another one...durrrrrrr..... It's an HP SurStore with 6 Ultrium cassettes in the case. We do offsites twice a week, and we cannot afford to lose over 30 years of member's financial data.
The server that runs it is ALSO the file server that our Bad-Mamma-Jamma ES47 offloads Network reports to every morning for employees to access. What happens is that if the backups are still going in the morning when the reports start coming in, that poor box gets SLAMMED with all the data it has to write to the drives. It's a HP Netserver with 2 PII-400's and 768MB SDRAM. It has 5 9.1Gig 10,000 RPM SCSI drives in RAID-5. The SureStore Drive is on an Adaptec 29160 card.
This box is also our Print Server :eek:
I now have an extra Poweredge 2650 in the rack with dual 2.4 XEONS, a gig of DDR, and 5 36 Gig, 15K Cheetahs in RAID-5. I'm going to slap Veritas on that puppy and see of it's a network issue or a tape drive speed issue.

Anyone mugrated Veritas over to a new rig? Pretty simple?
 
Originally posted by mitch808
Why are people relating this to home offices and computer geek solutions? This is a business class solution where tried and true rule. Tape and other forms of removable media are the defacto standard.
Click to expand...

No one ever claimed this was a thread *specifically* for enterprise level backup solutions, the main question typhoon43
asked was why or how he could solve his slow backup problems to which options were given.

There are definite pros and cons of each solution whether it be HDD or tape based backup. This is where a couple of us believe in evaluating businesses based on what *they* need and not what everybody else is doing.
 
Just make sure that if you're backing up to a hard drive(s) that you're not just doing a direct copy of all the data each night and deleting the old files.

What I mean is this, what if a user discovers on Wed that on Mon they deleted a file that they need? If you're just copying everything from one folder to another it might have gotten overwritten. Unless you plan on cycling hard drives when you do your backups, much like inserting a new tape.

I know it's tempting especially when you consider price/gig and speed, but, I'm not sure I'm ready to make the move yet.
 
Originally posted by mitch808
Why are people relating this to home offices and computer geek solutions? This is a business class solution where tried and true rule. Tape and other forms of removable media are the defacto standard.
Click to expand...

wake up *tap tap* wake up

TAPE DRIVES ARE ON THEIR WAY OUT

even quantum sees this, was that link i posed enterprise enough for you?

what can you do with a tape that you cant do faster/cheaper with a hard disk?

and remember ANY backup solution is only as good as its design/implementation
 
My Work:
M-Thurs - Incremental
Friday Night = Full

We back up about 40 servers to a 3 x 40/80Gb ADIC 100 using arcserve 2000.
We pull down about 300-500Mb/min writing directly to tape. That setup was run by a Dual pIII 600 Compaq Proliant.

We are now running ArcServe 2000 Doing 'disk to tape' with the machine i threw together here
Dell 600SC, 1.8Ghz, 2Gb Reg'd ECC, 1.8Tb IDE RAID array.
machine has been up for about 2 months now and we pull about 600Mb/min over the 10/100 network and ~900Mb/min over the small GigE backplane.

I have no idea how you are getting your tape drive to go that slow. You said it was an Ultrium autoloader? that should be able to pull in 500Mb/min+ no sweat.
Are you using any kind of Open File Agents? Fiddling with them in our setup made a huge speed difference.


Flecom: Interesting Link, But how in the hell are they pulling off 2Tb/hr? That's about 33 Gigabytes a minute, or 500MB/sec? I don't even know of a disk array that can write that fast.
 
have no idea how you are getting your tape drive to go that slow. You said it was an Ultrium autoloader? that should be able to pull in 500Mb/min+ no sweat.
Click to expand...

Ambit. The system was in place when I came in. I did have to upgrade to 9.1 when I called Veritas bitching about the speed. They told me to upgrade first. and see if that would fix it. I also had to install the Network Agent on all the servers so Veritas could pull them. What I've noticed is that our SQL boxes are excrutiatingly slow. Try 1.2 gigs in 4 hours most of the time :eek: I've used both HP's drivers and Veritas' version of teh same driver and noticed nothing. The reason I think it's Processor/HD related is that the VERIFY portion of the backup where I have the drive check the data just FLIES. The throughput rates are awesome. That tells me it's prbably not the physical drive.

I'll try the new server and report back. Thanks a TON for the input fellas. I've only been an official admin for 8 months and it's a constant learning process.
 
1.2gb in 4 hours?

no way, my old 10/20 DLT goes a million times faster than that

you are having some other (serious!) issues :eek:
 
I agree with Flecom, I backup a lot more data than 1.2GB, and my DLT 20/40 drives are way faster. I use Veritas 9 with all the various (costly) agents.... for the DBs, I back those up to a RAID-5 array using the backup folder option in Veritas.... the whole DB takes about 15min or less for a complete backup. For the "offsite" component of the backup solution, I have a NAS in another building across town (11Mb wireless bridge) that I then copy the archive files to. Works out pretty well.
 
I work in 2 different environments:

1) Full time job is an enterprise environment with 1000 employees, 10 divisions around the country with WAN links, and about 750 GB of data to back up nightly.

2) Part time consulting is for a small company with 30 employees, only 6 in the office, 1 server, and at most 4GB of data in a full backup.

The thing that I have found is that there is no single "right" solution to backups since no two environments are the same. FLECOM is right, tapes are on their way out, but today they are sill the top solution for many environments. They have a number of great advantages in the short term including legacy support, cost, and "upper management understanding."

What we use the the enterprise environment is two HPaq autoloaders, each hold 24 tapes and there are 5 drives between the two. The new of these drives can back up in excess of a Gig a minute under good conditions.

The small environment I have a single external HPaq 4mm 20/40 drive connected to the server by SCSI and last night's differential backed up 700MB in about 11 minutes. Keep in mind that is all local data, but still I think the speeds you are seeing are way too slow.
 
Originally posted by FLECOM
wake up *tap tap* wake up

TAPE DRIVES ARE ON THEIR WAY OUT

even quantum sees this, was that link i posed enterprise enough for you?

what can you do with a tape that you cant do faster/cheaper with a hard disk?

and remember ANY backup solution is only as good as its design/implementation
Click to expand...


Since when did Quantum ever dictate the backup market? They are just rying to make more revenue by offering more products. Move on young padawan.
 
hehe FLECOM being called a "padawon" I've seen it all on the [H] now :D

Anyway, I agree there is something severely wrong with the speeds. I'll slap the tape drive on the new server and go from there.
 
One of my clients uses an external Sony DDS-4 Autoloader connected to a Dell Poweredge 2400 running Veritas Backup Exec 8.5 via an Adaptec 39160 SCSI controller. It backs up the data from itself and three other servers, including an Exchange 2000 server. They are connected by a plain 10/100 switch.

The nightly backups are about 53 GB and take just over 5 hours. So 10 GB per hour to a DDS-4 tape drive.

Iomega has some NAS + Tape combo solutions.

Certance has some disk-to-disk-to-tape products that might be worth a look.

Exabyte has some nice tape products as well, with their VXA series 160GB capacity Packet Tape drives.

Lots of choices out there.
 
For the record: Sony doesn't seem to think tapes are on their way out. Look at their latest AIT-4 stuff ( which, quite frankly, made me drool the first time I saw it ).

Tape is a good solution for long term storage.

Where I work, we have about 100 gigs of data to backup. So we choose the AIT-1 stuff, and we couldn't be happier.

Although the write speeds could definitely use a boost, most of the time taken up doing a full backup is spent compressing the data ( for us at least. Software compression. I don't trust hardware compression. I like to know the size of what I'm blowing on to take before I blow it. You all have dirty minds ).
 
Originally posted by mitch808
Since when did Quantum ever dictate the backup market? They are just rying to make more revenue by offering more products. Move on young padawan.
Click to expand...

ok so then who does? :rolleyes:

tape drives are basically just down to quantum and sony

who else makes tape drives? oh jedi master :eek:
 
I'd love to have a tape backup; I have 230GB of stuff worth backing up. Too expensive though :(
 
Originally posted by FLECOM
ok so then who does? :rolleyes:

tape drives are basically just down to quantum and sony

who else makes tape drives? oh jedi master :eek:
Click to expand...

I'll back FLECOM on this. I don't always back him, but he is right with the tape drive issue, it's on its way out.
 
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