Folks,

I'm trying to decide between a Networker Advanced File Device and a
Virtual Tape Library for an upgrade to our backup system next year.  Our
2008 budget requests are due Friday so I have to decide soon.

According to my boss the main criteria is "disk copy speed" restores for
complete file systems/disks, an event that occurs maybe once every 3
years on average.  The last one took us about 24 hours to restore 3
disks with a total of around 400 GB on them from an AIT-2 tape.  He also
would like to have faster backups.

When I look at AFD vs. VTL I just get more confusion than enlightenment.
I have read most of the messages that have come across this list about
the subject and I also went to Backup Central to explore the subject but
it hasn't helped that much in distinguishing between the two.  I realize
that there's a lot more than the simple speed of the backup device
involved in backup/restore speeds and I've told my boss this but he's
not hearing me too well on the subject.

Our current environment is Networker 7.2.2 on Windows 2000 with 2 AIT-4
drives, one for backing up to and one for cloning to.  The size of the
backed up data (after compression) is around 700-800 GB and increasing
by 10-30 GB per month with occasional larger jumps..  Currently a full
backup runs in about 14 hours and the subsequent cloning normally takes
a similar amount of time.  This is not currently a problem since the
full starts shortly after midnight on Saturday but it will be in another
year or so.  The guys that set up the file systems insist on having
fewer larger devices so of the 60 or so file systems on a 9 different
servers all but 3 of them take 1.25 hours or less to backup up and the
"big" 3 take 10-14 hours to backup (the biggest is 186 GB compressed
with 1367784 files).  I've told them it doesn't matter that much how
fast the backup device is since even now the server with these files is
not able to keep the AIT-4 drive at max speed most of the time but they
don't believe me.

We will be upgrading most of the equipment (backup and file servers) in
the coming year as it is over 4 years old.

So I know it's been discussed before but any suggestions/information you
can enlighten me with will be appreciated.  Let me know if you need
further information.

Thanks,
Dave

David Werth
Garmin AT, Inc
Salem, Oregon
dave.werth<at>garmin.com


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