LTO-3 Autoloader Recommendation

I am looking at the Gateway 823 LTO-3 Autoloader, and I will appreciate
user feedback. What features should I look for in such a tape drive?
The featues I seek include the following: U320 or U160 interface, NT
Backup and Veritas BENT/Win2003 compatibility, 8 slots, support for a
cleaning tape, internal barcode ready (as a future upgrade option), and
rackmountable. I'll look at other vendors if recommended.

Thanks

Dan Adams

I am looking at the Gateway 823 LTO-3 Autoloader, and I will appreciate
user feedback. What features should I look for in such a tape drive?
The featues I seek include the following: U320 or U160 interface, NT
Backup and Veritas BENT/Win2003 compatibility, 8 slots, support for a
cleaning tape, internal barcode ready (as a future upgrade option), and
rackmountable. I'll look at other vendors if recommended.

Interested in this too as I'm looking at our strategy for the next five
years. Anyone had any experience of the Freecom Superloader units? In the
UK, the 8 slot LTO2 is £2,300 and 8 slot LTO3 is £3,000. The HP 8 slot LTO3
StorageWorks is £3,400.

Cheers, Rob.

I haven't heard of the brand name. However I had a look at an EXABYTE
VXA autoloader. It uses propriertary media but the user was quite
bullish about the technology, and especially the option to use firewire
in a Mac XSERVE environment. BTW, EXABYTE also makes LTO drives.

What backup strategy are you looking at? I'm moving to a
disk-to-disk-to-tape system. I probably will go with disk-to-disk
replication using low-end DAS/NAS with SATA drives, and then upgrade to
a continous protection backup server with a higher end DAS
fiber-to-SATA backplane.

How does this differ from using DDS3 and DDS4 DAT drives to backup
files stored on local and remote servers using NT Backup and Veritas
Backup Exec ?

Dan

What backup strategy are you looking at? I'm moving to a
disk-to-disk-to-tape system. I probably will go with disk-to-disk

I don't think we need that level of redundancy so we'll be sticking (I
assume) with disk-to-tape backup across the network using BE agents with the
backups running most of the time across a gigabit backbone. Our current
backup requirements are only 200GB so actually a single LTO-3 drive would
suffice. But we're planning for growth.

Rob.

To Dan & Rob... you guys are aware that LTO-3 isn't the right choice
for every environment, right? It's not just a tape capacity issue,
you need to make sure that your solution will be able to _stream_ data
to the tape drive.

We'll be streaming off SCSI servers on a gigabit backbone. We'll probably
carry on using our existing LTO-1 tapes for anyway.

Should that be okay?

Thanks, Rob.

Also, LTO-3 drives can *read* LTO-1 media but you can not write on them.

Hmm, might be better sticking with LTO-2. Can an LTO-2 drive write to LTO-1
tapes?

Thanks, Rob.

"Rob Nicholson" wrote in message
...
To Dan & Rob... you guys are aware that LTO-3 isn't the right choice
for every environment, right? It's not just a tape capacity issue,
you need to make sure that your solution will be able to _stream_ data
to the tape drive.

We'll be streaming off SCSI servers on a gigabit backbone. We'll probably
carry on using our existing LTO-1 tapes for anyway.

Should that be okay?

Thanks, Rob.

A single LTO-3 drive (70+ MB/s native...) can fully saturate the practical
bandwith of a GbE interface, so in reality a Gigabit backbone is not
adequate. You'll also have a hard time getting all your servers to deliver
the required data fast enough. If you really want to use LTO-3 you'll need
either SAN shared connectivity or a local fast disk buffer on the backup
server (read up on D2D2T).

Also, LTO-3 drives can *read* LTO-1 media but you can not write on them.

Rob

"Rob Nicholson" wrote in message
...
Also, LTO-3 drives can *read* LTO-1 media but you can not write on them.

Hmm, might be better sticking with LTO-2. Can an LTO-2 drive write to
LTO-1 tapes?

Thanks, Rob.

Yes it can. You do have a media recycle and archive policy in use, I assume?
Do you keep track on how often your current tapes are used and when you
should retire them?

Rob

How does my proposed setup stnadup against "shoe-shining":

12-bay dsik array with SCSI U320 to SATA backplane (initially 5 500GB
SATA II drives), and LTO3 drive attached to an Adaptec 39160 (SCSI
U160) PCI-X HBA on a Dual Xeon/800FSB 2.8Ghz box with 1GB DDR RAM.

Veritas Backup Exec 10d with CPS, AOFO, IDR and DLO pulls data from
servers and desktops/laptops to disk array, which in turn is backuped
to LTO3 autoloader.