Hi,
I know these types of questions are difficult to answer, but will try to
provide all pertinent information. Looking to purchase a new tape
library, LTO or SDLT most likely and would like some advice or
recommendations.
We have a bunch of existing LTO gen 1 media and SDLT 220 tapes, so would
prefer to continue to use these, but I see that the newer Quantum
libraries -- at least the ones I've seen on their web site -- seem to be
all SDLT 320 minimum, or higher, which I'm guessing will read the 220s
but will not write to them? We'd like a library with at least 50 slots
as our existing ATL P1000 SDLT only has 30, and that gets kinda tight
sometimes on the SDLTs as it's hard to keep both the tapes needed for
recoveries and "new" tapes all available all the time. Our Storagetek
LTO L80 library has about 80 slots, so that's been nice, and we're never
tight there.
The Quantum libraries have been very reliable, and I'd really like to
get another SDLT library so we can make better use of our existing SDLT
media, but I'm open to LTO, too. None of our libraries is really rack
mountable so would like to get a narrower profile unit, standard rack
mountable. Would need at least 2 drives with room for growth. We've had
a few issues with LTO media, but this may have been due to the fact that
our previous LTO purchase was Imation and not Fuji or Maxell as others
have admonished. Most of our SDLT media, which I have seen fewer
problems with, has been Fuji or Quantum. The Quantum libraries have been
very reliable, so that was another reason for possibly favoring them,
plus they allow me to directly move tapes around via the LCD (outside
purview of Legato) without having to use special software or web
interface.
We back up about 67 clients in a standard ethernet, using LSI Logic dual
channel SCSI cards attached via Unix servers, max 2 drives per channel.
We have one primary Sun server and one storage node server (Dell
PowerEdge 6600) running Linux. The storage node server manages both the
ATL P1000 SDLT library and the Storagetek L80. The primary server
manages an older P1000 DLT7000 library. We're a bit behind on our
NetWorker release -- still running 6.1.1 -- but will be upgrading to a
new release as soon as we can migrate the existing primary server over
to a newer Sun (Solaris) box, at which point the older DLT7000 unit will
be dropped (will keep around for recovers, of course), and the primary
server will probably run the existing SDLT library, and the storage node
will be down to the STK L80 only. I'm thinking to buy another storage
node license so we can add another storage node server (probably a Dell
PowerEdge 6650) and possibly run a new library on there, or could use
the existing storage node server.
Not really looking to purchase a second NetWorker server license as I
think one server and storage node combo seems to be fine. Not looking to
get the latest and greatest technology. Would prefer to use "known" and
"proven" equipment and tapes -- something that will work with Legato --
but do need to consider a 1-2 year road map. Would like to avoid
spending too much, though.
Thanks.
George
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