Definitely better to keep your tape drives spinning. I've reduced thenumber of 
drives each of my media servers is allowed to use forbackups because I can 
stream drives at 50-60M/sec, but with a singleGB connection and doing inline 
tape copy, I can't really feed morethan one pair of drives. So each of my media 
servers is given 2drives. There's other bottle necks with things like a 33 MHz, 
32bitpci bus on one of the older servers that limit me to about 40MB/s 
fromnetwork and to 2 tape drives before the bus is saturated on thatsystem.
Another option if restore times are important to you, is to use a diskstaging 
storage unit and then go from there off to tape without thenetwork involved. 
Then you get the restore advantages of anon-multiplexed backup while still 
streaming data to your tapes andtaking in data from your network at a 
reasonable rate.
-Charlie
On 5/11/05, Piszcz, Justin <jpiszcz AT servervault DOT com> wrote:>  >  > > 
Also, if this is true: > >   > > Is it better to use multiplexed backups if 
each source(client) is only> 5-10MB/s and the combined sources will give it a 
smooth 50-60MB/s? > >   > > Justin. > >   >  >  
________________________________>  > > From: Dean [mailto:dean.deano AT gmail 
DOT com] >  Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 6:31 PM>  To: Piszcz, Justin>  Cc: 
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>  Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Best way 
to backup 3TB of data daily? >  > >   > > You should be able to get much more 
than 20 MB/s on an LTO2 drive. I have> seen 60 - 80 MB/sec on a single drive. 
Drip feeding 5 LTO2's with 100MB/sec> will lead to shoe-shining on the drives, 
damaging both drives and media.>  >  As others suggested, turn the server with 
all the data into a SAN Media> Server and connect it to your tape SAN, or do 
some mirroring and off-host> backup. >  > > On 5/12/05, Piszcz, Justin <jpiszcz 
AT servervault DOT com> wrote: >  > > All, > >   > > I was curious if anyone 
here is backing up large amounts of data, such as> large databases and 
fileservers that are 3TB or bigger. > > What is the best way to accomplish such 
backups? > >   > > Here is one 'idea' ? please let me know if there are other, 
better ways: > >   > > If one can sustain 100 megabytes per second over a 
gigabit link writing to> multiple (5) LTO2 tape drives, each doing 20MB/s then 
it would still take> around 8 hours to backup this information, essentially you 
would need a> complete backup solution JUST for this 3TB array. > >   > > What 
are some good methods when backing up such large data sets? > >   > > Thanks! > 
>   > >