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Mid-Size Business Tape Library Suggestions? 98

Posted by Cliff from the new-backup-technology-wanted dept.
MPankau asks: "My current company is quickly outgrowing our current tape library and I'm looking for some advice on where to start looking. We backup approximately 12TB of data per night with about 3TB of that going to a disk backup on an EMC Clarion CX600. We're primarily looking for something that will give us some room for growth and be cost effective. What tape formats and library solutions would Slashdot readers recommend? Also, are there any other data backup solutions out there that may be better than tape?"
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Mid-Size Business Tape Library Suggestions? More

Mid-Size Business Tape Library Suggestions?

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  • AIT (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Dante ( 3418 ) *
    What ever library you choose. Make it AIT4

    • Re:AIT (Score:2)

      by suso ( 153703 ) *
      What ever library you choose. Make it AIT4

      Major funding for this message was brought to you by Sony.

      • Re:AIT (Score:5, Informative)

        by fimbulvetr ( 598306 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @01:02AM (#14996475)
        Actually, I'd agree with him for tape devices. Of all the mid-sized tape drives/changes I've ever dealt with, the AIT class has always won, no contest. Although data silos and other high end storage put them to shame in big-data environments, they are certainly not to be looked over in small to mid sized areas. I've ran every thing from DLTs to Travans to drives that aren't even around any more. The DLT drives I run, even with regular cleaning, need the drive replaced every 12-18 months and the tapes are only slightly better. I've taken over AIT2 drives that were a year old, and worked for the next 3. I've since left the company but recently visited and they were still using them. That's 5 years. Same drives. The AIT3 we purchased at that company is now about 3 years old. No problems there, either. I can't wait to start using an ait4. Awesome storage capabilites, excellent speed, good compression, amazingly reliable and not too expensive.

        P.S. I also usually passionately dislike Sony.
        • We use AIT3 to backup medical images at the hospital I work at. We have had tons of problems with them. Our AIT2's and DATs have been rock solid though.

          Supposedly AIT5's are due out later this year. I think they are supposed to hold 500GB uncompressed.

      • Re:AIT (Score:1)

        by grub ( 11606 )

        No kidding.

        We use LTO2 and are looking at LTO3. It's an open standard, unlike the GP's Sony adver^Wsuggestion.

    • Re:AIT (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sirwired ( 27582 )
      What makes me nervous about AIT is my lack of faith in Sony's commitment to the product. The predecessor to AIT, DTF was supposed to be Sony's long-term format, but they changed their minds, making any investments in the old format obsolete. (DTF used gigantic tapes, and Sony was right to change their minds, but that didn't help those with DTF libraries.)

      You are tied to Sony drives, and since the form factor is not even close to LTO, DLT or 3590/3592, your selection of libraries is also limited.

      SirWired

    • LTO and StorageTEK SL-500 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ayden ( 126539 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @02:53AM (#14996751) Homepage Journal
      I disagree strongly.

      LTO3 is the way to go: 400 GB native 800 GB compressed.
      http://www.lto-technology.com/ [lto-technology.com]

      Look at the StorageTEK SL-500. The library is modular and can be expanded (up to 500 slots and 15 drives) as you requirements dictate.
      http://www.storagetek.com/products/product_page228 3.html [storagetek.com]

      I run our company HQ on 5 LTO2 drives in 142 slot library. Weekly full backups about 5 TB. Daily incremental backups take another 3-4 TB per week.
      • We recently started switching from SDLT320's to LTO3 libraries, and the oldest LTO3 libraries we have are starting to have problems. We've already replaced maybe 5 of the 35 drives we've bought so far, after 8 months. It's still too soon to tell if this was just an abnormality or if we can expect to have more problems with the drives/tapes, but for nervous buyers I'd say go with AIT for now.

        Also, avoid quantum libraries like the plague. We've had constant problem with all of our quantum libraries, abo
        • We use HP LTO2 drives and have only replaced one over the past year. I recommend buying a support contract with StorageTEK (or whoever your vendor is). STK replaced the drive for free the same day it failed.

          Does anybody have information on the performance of IBM drives?

  • Call EMC back, write another check (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @11:34PM (#14996233)
    Seriously. Yes, you could cobble something together with 'tar' (this is afterall Slashdot). You already have EMC gear. Buy more. That's what they DO. Your company does $FOO, EMC does storage. They would buy $FOO from you, since its not what they DO.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday March 25, 2006 @11:44PM (#14996255)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • What kind of backups are you doing? Incremental or differential? Monthly full backups plus nightly and/or weekly? Knowing which you do and what kind of schedule you run backups on will determine what is the best way to backup essential data as this can dramatically change the way you make your critical backups...

  • Depends on what you want to do (Score:5, Informative)

    by Xross_Ied ( 224893 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @12:01AM (#14996311) Homepage
    IF you want long term archiving, still need tape.

    BUT IF you want weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly backups then a virtual tape library (VTL) is a better option. For most servers, the change in the dataset is small and gradual so a VTL stores one full compressed back + diffs for incremental/differential/full backups. Also, VTLs look for redundant data across servers; 10 similar linux servers will have the almost identical binaries.

    I am currently looking at http://www.datadomain.com/ [datadomain.com] VTL to replace a 72 slot dual drive LTO 1st gen library.

    A VTL costs a bit less than a regular tape library + all the tapes you need but the increased throughput and no more tape handling is what makes it worth it.

    0.02cents.

    • Re:Depends on what you want to do (Score:4, Informative)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Sunday March 26, 2006 @12:57AM (#14996464)
      VTLs are great, but...

      It's hard for a small business to keep offsites with a VTL. For a big business with a dedicated circuit to a remote datacenter, it's just fine, but most companies can't afford that. He'll still need a tape solution. It would certainly be faster and cheaper to use the VTL for nightlies and only produce a single set of tapes per week though. It may even make a cheaper tape solution more tolerable.

      If he doesn't care to continue using a legacy backup software package, then a VTL is useless, because there is no need to maintain the tape paradigm and the virtualization layer, and he could start using snapshoting instead.
      • Most VTL have support for remote replication but it is usually extra.

        Depending on requirements, broadband link is all that is needed.
        More bandwidth can be had with point to point microwave links (300km limit).

        • Depending on requirements, broadband link is all that is needed.

          That would not be a very high requirement. A broadband link is quite a reduction from the 12MB/s that I see on tape libraries. With good outbound DSL, you might be lucky to get 512kbps, but less than half that is more likely.

          More bandwidth can be had with point to point microwave links (300km limit).

          How much does that cost? That doesn't sound cheap.
        • Why bother virtualizing tape then? Why not do snapshoting with replication, or CDP.

          VTLs are only interesting for interfacing with legacy software.
    • I worked as an architect on a project that needed access to 120 tb, and had strict performance requirements. It wasn't a daily backup, and our solution was a Disk/WORM library. However, I did get a chance to play around with FileNet [filenet.com], which created an interesting layer, in that it will intelligently determine which files are more commonly accessed/updated and store them online on a disk cache and schedule the other files to automatically move to a library.

      In your scenario, this could eliminate the need to

    • IF you want long term archiving, still need tape

      Perhaps. EMC has some low-cost high density stuff used by the finance industry a lot, but I'd still look into MAID disk arrays (massive arrays of inactive disks). They have better response than tapes and don't chew anywhere near the power of a large RAID array; disks with info not being used don't spin except for an algorithm-based spin-up exerciser. Iirc they also use acoustic sensors and other interesting bits to pro-actively determine a failing disk, w

  • LTO is the way to go, it has a current capacity of 400 GB per tape, and is available in autoloaders of all sizes, is made by four manufacturers, and has a roadmap clear through 3.2 TB per tape.
  • This is pretty much the only real sofware: Symantec (formerly Veritas) NetBackup Enterprise Server 6 [veritas.com] Hardware: Recommend a StorageTek L80 [storagetek.com] with whatever drives you see fit. And of course a server to match.. recommend Sun Solaris. If you want, I'll set it up for ya :)
  • Companies like http://www.idealstor.com/ [idealstor.com] use ejectable hard drives instead of tapes. This has several advantages, including the ability to have backups in native format: just browse to the ejectable shared drive and copy your data. I don't have the stats on the newer tape systems, but last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months. The shelf life of a hard drive is much longer. 400GB hard drives don't run any more than LTO2 tapes, so it doesn't cost more money. From the web si

    • Re:Do you really need TAPES? (Score:4, Informative)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Sunday March 26, 2006 @01:06AM (#14996481)
      Yes, you really need tapes for archival backup.

      The shelf life may be longer on hard drives, but the chance of the tape surviving the move to the offsite storage facility is way higher. The infrastructure for connecting a large number of hard drives (switch ports, backplanes, caddys, etc...) ends up costing more than the drive (BTW, 400GB drives cost between five and ten times more than an LTO2 tape), and the automation just doesn't exist (changer robots, barcoding, etc...).

      Virtual tape is great, but it's not archival, and it's not offsite. If you're not already tied to tape and tape software, there is no point in using those solutions when you could do snapshotting or CDP instead.
    • The 1 Bay comes preinstalled with Windows XP professional and offers excellent performance for data recovery and backup.

      Great. As if the workstations weren't enough of a headache, now we need to patch, maintain, reboot and license the "tape drive". No thanks. Get a linux box with hotswappable sata. Better yet, it'd be less of a headache to reboot the linux box and swap the drive than go through the hassle of running that crapfest. Not to mention Linux could easily support AES encryption of the drives withou
    • but last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months.

      You must not have checked very recently. If stored under proper conditions, LTO has a shelf life of 30 years.

      I would NEVER trust my archival data to a 400GB drive that cost about as much as a LTO2 tape.

      SirWired

      • I would NEVER trust my archival data to a 400GB drive that cost about as much as a LTO2 tape.

        We bought a bunch more LTO2 tapes for ~CA$75. Way less than a 400 GB drive and far less things to worry about ("Will the motor spin up if I need it in 2 years?" etc etc)

    • last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months.

      Huh? 18 months? You must be rewriting to the same tape daily. Or more often. The barrier that you are running into is the maximum number of read/write passes rather than any limitation on how long the tape will hold data.

      What you need really depends on how long you need to keep the data. If you want to store data on something that you can set aside and reload years later, tape is the way to go.

      Ideally, you should use both.

    • I have tapes from 1982 sitting next to me which I could have on a disk in a couple of hours after dusting off the right hardware and grabbing a few cables (which will still plug into a new SCSI card). Hard drives sound good - but can they be trusted in the same way?
    • I don't have the stats on the newer tape systems, but last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months.

      I don't know where you got that, but we occasionally pull data off of 10 year old dat tapes. They are very reliable.
    • I agree. We use the Idealstor 8 Bay and it is far better than the tape system we relied on before. We have a rotation of 500GB disks for our daily,weekly and monthly. We kept our old tape drive around to run backups from the 8 Bay to our tape for our annual archive.
    • ...last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months.

      The 1980's called, they want their tapes back.
      Seriously, tapes last way longer than 18 months. Also, they store well. While a harddrive backup is nice for quick recovery, for long term storage it's a non-starter. First off, I can go over to Dell and buy a 20 pack of LTO-2 tapes for $1,000 or about $50/tape (we use a Dell tape library). Compare that to $88 for a Western Digital WD2000 (200GB ATA100) from Newegg (400GB dr
  • Go for a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 960 Tape Drive [hp.com]. It stores 800 MB compressed (2:1) data.

    • Re:Ultrium (Score:3, Funny)

      by emerrill ( 110518 )
      Umm, thats GB, 800GB. It would be pretty useless at 800MB :)

    • Re:Ultrium (Score:4, Interesting)

      by afabbro ( 33948 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @01:21AM (#14996524) Homepage
      Ultrium, yes (perhaps - this is really a broad question). HP, no. There is no point in buying anything HP in storage these days because it's just rebadged equipment (disk, tape, etc.)...with a healthy premium for the HP logo.

      The big three in enterprise-class tape library manufacturers are IBM, StorageTek (now part of Sun), and ADIC. Buy from one of them. Don't waste your time with HP.

      My personal favorite are IBM's 3581/2/3/4 line. I've worked with all of them and they have some nice features...partitioning, WWN at the drive slot level rather than the drive, virtual I/O ejects, expandability by stacking on frames, highly-available pickers, multiple pickers for high-use environments, etc. Some of the other vendors are catching up, but that's the key...these are all features IBM had in the 3584 five years ago.

      • Re:Ultrium (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bernywork ( 57298 ) *
        Depends on what your discount schedule is I guess..

        I know for a fact that it costs me 20% less to buy HP than IBM because of my discount schedule with my reseller. On top of which I also get a great deal on support, 3 year 24x7x6 warranties cost me next to nothing with HP compared with IBM.

        • Yes, if you're dealing with middlemen, then what/how much you buy, what they carry, etc. can skew the results.

          I work for a Fortune 500 company and we're large enough to buy direct from both HP and IBM. HP is always more expensive. The hilarious thing is that on disk, HP is significantly more expensive than Hitachi, when it's the exact same equipment (HP just rebrands Hitachi, e.g. XP1024 = Hitachi 9980, XP12000 = Hitachi Tagma, etc.). We're talking like 20% more. Likewise, Hitachi tape equipment is mo

      • Re:Ultrium (Score:3, Informative)

        by ayden ( 126539 )
        There are 3 major manufacturers of LTO2 drives: HP, IBM and Quantum. HP actually makes the LTO2 drives in my StorageTEK SL-500. The company we acquired last September also uses STK libraries (L80, L40 and 3 L20's) all of which have HP drives.

  • Depends on what you need... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sirwired ( 27582 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @02:23AM (#14996663)
    How much of that data is simple backup, and how much goes off-site for long-term archiving? For on-site backup, Virtual Tape Libraries going to dirt-cheap SATA arrays are becoming rather interesting and useful choices.

    For off-site archiving, you really need tape. There are any number of expandable libraries available from any number of vendors. Personally, I am most familiar with the IBM 3584. This can be expanded to a rather large number of drives and slots, and the LTO drives it usually is equipped with are pretty darn solid. (And the 3592 drives you can buy if you have a LOT of money even more so.)

    What you REALLY need to pay attention to when building a tape backup solution (which most customers ignore), is environmental and storage conditions, for both your data center and your off-site storage (if any). I think this is a far more important thing to focus on than what brand of library or drive you purchase. Pay VERY close attention to the data sheets for the tapes and drives. Tape can be easily fouled by humidity that is too low (static), or too high (sticking). Same goes with temperature. Stacking the tapes improperly can result in edge tracking issues, which in turn causes little bits of tape to fly around your drive when the drives rollers break them off when shoving the badly-tracked tape at high speeds past the heads.

    For software, again, you have a lot of choices. On one hand, you have "traditional" backup applications like Veritas and Legato. These perform your traditional full, differential, etc., backups. On the other end, you have full-fledged data management apps like IBM's TSM. TSM can be a pain to configure, but if done properly, it is very tape efficient, and it has great support for live DB backups, staged backups, file versioning, data expiration (as opposed to mere tape expiration), etc.

    Good Luck,

    SirWired

    • Re:Depends on what you need... (Score:5, Informative)

      by The Blue Meanie ( 223473 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @05:46AM (#14997119)
      Give the man a cigar (or a mod up if you happen to have the points).

      I've been responsible for tape backups in most of the positions I've held over the last 12 years or so. I've worked with most of the major tape formats including QIC, 4mm DDS, 8mm, AIT, DLT, and LTO.

      I'm currently using an IBM 3584 with 3xLTO2 drives. It's almost a pleasure to work with. It doesn't jam. It doesn't lose track of what tapes it has loaded. It's fairly fast. Every other autoloader I've ever worked with has been a pain. ESPECIALLY the DLT loaders. I don't think I've EVER seen a DLT drive last longer than a year before simply crapping out and needing to be replaced. I can count almost a dozen DLT drive failures I've had to cope with. I have yet - in 3 years of continuous use - to physically lose an LTO drive (although I admit all three of mine did lock up at one point due to a firmware bug).

      I've also suffered with all of the major backup packages including ArcServe, BackupExec, NetBackup, Legato, and TSM. You know what I've discovered about choosing backup software? It's like picking who to vote for in an election. It's impossible to pick ANY of them based on any sort of positive criteria. You simply have to settle for the one that SUCKS the LEAST. And after being forced to use all of these packages, I can say without a doubt that TSM far and away sucks the least of all of them. You could not pay me enough to run a backup system based on NetBackup EVER again. I wouldn't trust it (or most of the other alleged "backup" systems) with data that had ANY value to me or my employer, whatsoever. I've seen more than one NetBackup installation simply implode, taking the entire catalog with it and needing to basically be rebuilt from scratch, having each and every tape in the inventory re-cataloged from beginning to end. And even when the catalog was still intact, I've had less than a 70% success rate in getting NetBackup to actually RESTORE something I needed restored. Almost a third of my attempts to get data back out of a NetBackup backup system resulted in random, unexplainable failures with cryptic numeric result codes that basically translated to "unknown internal error" according to the docs. On the other end of the spectrum, using TSM, I've successfully restored whole directory trees that were accidentally deleted in just a few minutes, whole Oracle databases that were damaged beyond recovery in a few hours, and I've done a bare-metal restore of both a complete Solaris server and a complete Novell server to a fully functional state in less than 4 hours each. Those last two were scheduled recovery exercises - I don't have ACTUAL failures that need restores very often. We have a bare-metal restore DR exercise for a Windows 2000 system scheduled for the early part of next month, and I expect it will work almost as easily as the other two.

      Plus with TSM's Disaster Recovery Manager feature, offsite tape management is brain-dead simple. The system automatically keeps one copy of your data hot and ready in the tape changer on-site, so restores of accidentally deleted or corrupted files/databases can happen immediately, and another copy is fully maintained and rotated to offsite storage by the DRM for a disaster scenario in which the on-site equipment is destroyed. The daily outbound and call-back reports are generated automatically, and plugging them into the offsite storage company's infrastructure is pretty easy. All I usually have to do is take the tapes out of the changer, and put the call-backs in the changer when they're dropped off.

      With my current 3584(LTO)/TSM setup, I can safely say - for the first time in over a *decade* of working as a system admin - that I am TOTALLY confident in my ability to restore our data center to 100% functionality in a total-loss scenario. I'd love to find out how many SysAdmins working with any other backup technology have that same level of confidence. I know I personally never had this level of confidence in my backups with any other backup software, and I was always at least a little concerned when using the other tape formats.
      • You get a cigar too.

        TSM's a great *GREAT* piece of software. Lots to love, especially the fact that your data magically comes back out of it. :)

        Portable Backupsets are awesome. If you haven't tried them yet, what are you waiting for? :)
    • I would have to agree with this and the other reply to the post. If you have the money and the time to set it up properly then a 3584 teamed with TSM produces a very very good backup environment.

      But make sure that you have it configured correctly and that you understand what it is doing. Also do not reply on vendor consultants to set it up for you as ... well ... in my experience we had three over time and we got refunds on two of them as they did not do anything and knew less about the products they were

  • My current company is quickly outgrowing our current tape library and I'm looking for some advice on where to start looking.

    Okay, here is an idea you should consider:

    Open your address book and look for $sales-contact at $storage-vendor and remember her phone number. You think that sounded easy? Okay, here comes the hard part:

    Pick up the phone, dial her number, and talk to your sales representative.

    I'm sure if you tell him/her that you are in the ballpark for $very-big-storage-solution she'll give you a doz

    • Yeah, like you can trust a sales representative to give you an honest broad picture of available technical solutions. "Surprise, _our_ products are better than anyone elses!"

      You can ask a saleperson to boost their own product or service, or disparage the competitor's products or service, but if you completely rely on them to pick something for you, then you are being incompetent at doing your "due diligence".

      I'm not saying that most advice that you get from Slashdot will be much better, but with a broad cro
  • I am just wondering, as the solution you use to do your backups needs to support your tape archive that you use.

    If compatible, I would look at something like:
    http://www.storagetek.com/products/product_page238 9.html [storagetek.com]

  • We backup approximately 12TB of data per night with about 3TB of that going to a disk backup on an EMC Clarion CX600. We're primarily looking for something that will give us some room for growth and be cost effective.

    That's a lot to backup and mouthful. This question seems to direct more toward business requirement. If the rate of the backup required excedes and outgrows the rate of revenue gain or loss due to insufficient backup, the risk must come from the management, I think. The backup cost investmen
  • Take a look at http://www.falconstor.com/vtl.asp [falconstor.com]

    They produce a VTL appliance that emulates many different libraries and uses (IIRC) your own hardware. You can then attache a library behind it and move tapes off to that as you need (for off site storage).

    Regards
    James

  • Ok, Ok, I know dell buys it from someone else, like they buy their fibrechannel SANs from EMC... but, we just bought one of these [dell.com] for the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech. Without the additional library component, it's i think 5U's, and holds 20 or 24 tapes. We are using 400GB/800GB LTO-type tapes. We back up to a gateway SAS (Scsi Attached Storage) array (it's slick - 2U, 12x500GB SATA drives, SCSI320 interfaces in back, manages all raid onboard), and flush from there to tape. We bought 75

  • UDO Archive Appliance (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How about a UDO Archive Appliance [plasmon.com]?

    It's "tiered" storage combining RAID and Ultra Density Optical 30GB disks (soon to be upgraded to 60BG). There is a range of Archive Appliances going from a few slots to over 600, from one internal UDO drive to about 8 or 10 IIRC.

    The idea is, the Appliance appears on your network as conventional Network Attached Storagae using FTP, NFS or SAMBA (the RAID part). You put your files on the RAID and the files are migrated to the UDO disks (two copies) which can then be taken

  • This company Avamar [avamar.com] is an archive to disk specialist.

    Disclosure: I am a shareholder and former employee. I haven't worked there for 2 years so this info is a little out of date... but they've been improving it susbstantially in that time frame so use this as a baseline.

    They are not a disk to disk staging server company like EMC. They focus on data archival on disk... have a system called RAIN (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes.. or Independent Nodes, both are correct) which uses N-Level parity like a RAI
  • Having only one measly tape drive that I used for about 2 days before giving up, can I ask the general nerd population why we're still using tapes ? I'd be fine if there were some sort of cost advantage but cheap hard drives have become cheaper than tapes now, and definitely more reliable.

    So here's my idea: hard drive libraries! Since SATA drives have a standardized connector layout, you could simply have a backplane and swap drives in and out as if they were tapes. As a bonus you'd get much faster read/
    • A hard drive library is not useful for long-term and/or offsite storage. You would need multiple libraries and cart them around to even keep a minimal backup set that goes back a few weeks or months.

      Also, HDs may or may not work after coming out of storage, tapes usually do, since there's less to break down in a tape.
      • Quite the opposite actually, tapes are brittle by nature. Have you ever tried to restore something older than a year or so ? Backups work great, it's the restoration that is prone to failures. Tapes dry out, rot, stretch/deform and all sorts of nasty things. Hard drives are sealed and will work great as long as you treat them with respect (i.e. don't drop them, don't microwave them, don't ship them by UPS).

        Hell, most DAT tapes crap out on me within 2 years. Crap, if I could revise history I'd spend my
        • DAT tapes are the cheapest around. In my experience they aren't made for enterprise use. For enterprise use go with LTO or maybe DLT. And buy good tapes in either one. You get what you pay for.
  • Backup falls across many platforms:

    * Desktop : workstations, laptops, pda's
    * Servers : per server - NO centralised management
    * DataCenter : dedicated console and bells/whistles

    To support the above, there are many types of Recovery scenarios:

    * Hot Restore : Replicate to a redundant/failover box/server/Cluster/Datacenter
    * Warm Restore : Restore capability to same or supported (redundant) hardware
    * Cold Restore : lights-o

  • LTO3 and STK L700 (Score:3, Informative)

    by dspyder ( 563303 ) on Monday March 27, 2006 @04:50PM (#15005651)
    We have an STK SL8500 loaded with various drives. For a medium-sized shop (12TB is quite a volume for a medium shop, btw) I would definitely recommend and L700 and a couple LTO3 drives. You can always connect a second library now or later. They have a new product, the L1400 that comes pre-configured with ACSLS built-in... might save you some time and energy if you have to mix backup environments.

        --D
    • the L1400 would more scalable for you if you see growth in the future. The entry cost isn't that much more than an L700 either.

      Stay away from the SL500. Had one of those at my last employer. the SL8500 is nice, but has a high entry cost. Scales forever, but very high entry. (have on of those now)
  • what is your backup window?
    how long do you want to keep the data around?
    how much does the data change?

    I'd be happy to give you some suggstions, butthose are the questions that need to be answered.

    Backup to disk isn't much good if you'reconsidering LTO3. It's faster tham most disk. it only helps with restore latency.

    I manage backups for about 300TB of data (mostly oracle, some file server). I'd be happy to through you some suggestions for free, or do a more formal proposal if your management likes that ki

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