I am currently assembling a quote for an LTO-4 tape backup system.  So far, I 
am looking at using a 16-slot Quantum SuperLoader 3 with LTO-4HH drive as the 
tape unit.  Married to this will be a server to act as the backup server that 
will drive the tape unit using Bacula to manage backups.  The server will be a 
quad core X3440 system with 4 GB of RAM and four 1 TB SATA 7200 rpm hard drives 
in a case that has room for eight hot-swap drives.  I plan on using FreeBSD 8 
on the system, using ZFS to raidz the drives together to provide spool space 
for Bacula.  I will be using an Areca ARC-1300-4X PCIe SAS card to interface 
with the tape drive.

My main question is this: is the Quantum SuperLoader 3 LTO-4 tape drive 
supported by Bacula 5 on FreeBSD?  In particular, is the autoloader fully 
supported?  The Bacula documentation indicates the SuperLoader works fully 
under Bacula, though not explicitly whether under FreeBSD.

The backup server will serve a GigE network cluster of perhaps a dozen machines 
with over 6 TB of storage, most of which is on the cluster's NFS server.  Does 
anyone have good advice on sizing the spool/holding/disk pool for a Bacula 
server?  Is it imperative to have enough disk space to hold a full backup 
(i.e., 6 TB in this case), or is it sufficient to have enough space to maintain 
streaming to tape?  (I don't have much experience of Bacula, having used it 
only to back up to disk.)  In other words, do I need more 1 TB drives in my 
backup server?

Finally, is 4 GB of RAM sufficient for good performance with ZFS?  Will ZFS on 
FreeBSD be able to maintain full streaming speeds to tape, given the various 
reports of I/O stalls under ZFS reported recently?

Thanks in advance for any advice or information.

Cheers,

Paul.
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