Dave,
We migrated our production Sun V890 SCSI L700 SDLT tape library solution to
a Dell RHEL fiber connected VTL with dedupe back in March of this year and
have seen increased backup throughput, and a lower backup failure rate as a
result.  One of the ways we were able to control costs was to work with our
customers to adjust our retention policy from a month to two weeks for
operational backups, and also removed a bunch of unnecessary cloning.  The
most difficult part of the process for us was how to size the VTL ( make
sure you have room for growth / caching ) and having enough time to work out
any hardware / software bugs before going live.  It took a little bit of
time to get things smoothed out, so if you have the luxury of time, use it.
Once things were worked out though, backups have been less painful to manage
and tape swapping / management is greatly reduced, which may be a soft cost
savings depending how much time is spent managing tapes.

Here is a quick look at our solution.

Production:

Networker 7.4.4
Dell R905 8 CPU / 32 GB RAM Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
EMC DL3D 3000 VTL with about 34 TB used.


Development:

Networker storage node
Dell R905 8 CPU / 32 GB RAM  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
Quantum i500 with 4 LTO 4 drives


Our backup solution uses a private LAN to send data around and the
production and development backup systems are separated over two different
campus about a mile apart.


Good luck with your planning.


Keith Roy
---<>---
Phone: (207)761-3179
Mobile: (207)415-8142
kroy AT fairchildsemi DOT com
---
Fairchild Semiconductor
Running Hill Road : MS 35-3A
South Portland, ME. 04106
---


On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 7:14 PM, Werth, Dave <dave.werth AT garmin DOT com> 
wrote:

> Folks,
>
> We are working on next year's budget.  I'm trying to figure out what sort
> of upgrade to our current hardware we want to do.
>
> Currently we are disk to tape to tape (clone).  We want to switch to a disk
> to disk to tape setup to speed up backups and restores.
>
> My thinking is along the lines of a VTL with de-duplication.
>
> Does anyone have any comments on the subject?
>
> Thanks, Dave
>
> Dave Werth
> Garmin AT, Inc.
> Salem, Oregon
>
>
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