On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 01:47, Tarjei T. Jensen wrote:
> Oscar Olsson  wrote:
> >Considering the cost of hardware, and the availability of hardware, plus
> >the speed of the hardware compared to equivalent SPARC hardware, an x86 or
> >IA64 based platform seems very appealing.
>
> Certainly, if your time has no value. To be honest, it is correct if you
> buy from a vendor which supports Linux+hardware like Unix vendors supports
> their Unix+hardware. The moment operating system and hardware comes from
> different vendors, we are back to finger pointing.

We've been running a Networker and Linux environment for 3 years and
have not experienced this. Out of curiosity do you also buy your tape
hardware from your server vendor?

If your vendor is finger pointing instead of offering to work with
another vendor then perhaps you need a better vendor?

> >Also, that argument is old and maybe not even valid any more. Linux has
> >been just as stable, but faster, if it has been configured correctly. WIth
> >the 2.6 kernel series, that will probably be even more true in the future.
> >The problem has been support for the OS and application vendor
> >certification.
>
> We have heard this for a long time. Then one does a kernel upgrade to fix
> some security issues. And then things begin to break.

Again, we've run Networker in an all Linux environment for 3 years and
have never had a kernel upgrade break our backup process.

I recall once when putting in a new backup server we did have a problem
with kernel panics while backing up to an IBM DLT tape library. The
problem was quickly solved by using an alternate adaptec kennel module
which was provided standard in the kernel package. No custom compiling
or going back to a vendor begging for a fix. In fact, we didn't even
call Red Hat. Instead the solution came after taking some time to think
about the problem and then searching both the LKML and the Red Hat
bugzilla tool for aic7xxx related kernel panics.

A quick bit about our environment.

We've been running Linux and Networker for 3 years now. We started out
on Red Hat Linux 6.2 with Networker 6.x and IBM DLT Libraries. Our
current environment is Red Hat Linux 7.3 with Networker 7.1.1 and IBM
LTO Tape libraries. In the future we will be moving to RHEL 3.0 with
Networker 7.1.1. and IBM LTO-2 Tape Libraries.

All of our clients are Linux based as well. Some clients have mysql and
postgres databases on them where we use cron jobs to dump the db
contents in to disk before taking a backup. You can think of this as
taking a db snapshot without the need to down the database.

We have a few clients that are not attached to the private backup LAN
and for those we stage to disk before going to tape. We've had no
problems doing this under Linux and I expect the process is the same as
you would find under Solaris.

Before moving to Linux I suggest you take the same precautions you would
when moving to any new OS environment. Talk to your hardware vendor and
ask about Linux support from them. For key software products, like
Legato, talk to the software vendors as well. Use the online vendor
knowledge base and bug tracking tools to see if hardware you have is
listed as having problems and what what solutions are involved. Once you
decide upon a Linux distribution go to the vendors bugzilla page and
list out all open bugs for the current release. Take a look at how
serious they are and see which ones you think might affect your
environment.

Yes, it takes a bit of research but it is research someone should be
doing no matter what OS they choose to switch to.

--
Scott Russell <lnxgeek AT us.ibm DOT com>
Linux Technology Center System Admin

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