Tape backup hardware recommendations?

B

BlueCoder

I don't have a specific need. I'm just wondering about experiences with brands of equipment when it comes to FreeBSD. Any any brands of equipment difficult? What about mixing and matching drives with libraries? Any best practices?
 
BlueCoder said:
I don't have a specific need. I'm just wondering about experiences with brands of equipment when it comes to FreeBSD. Any any brands of equipment difficult? What about mixing and matching drives with libraries? Any best practices?
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There are very few actual manufacturers of tape drives any more - most of them are "badge engineered" from one of the 4 or so actual manufacturers (if you're talking about LTO - the DLT situation is even worse).

You want to select a vendor who makes firmware updates available within a resonable timeframe, or one that lets you use the actual manufacturer's firmware directly.

Loader or library drives are generally modified versions of the standard drive - at a minimum, the front panel is removed and there's an additional interface (besides the user data connector) between the drive and library so each knows what the other is doing. It is sometimes possible to convert from loader/library to standalone or vice versa, but it can be a real pain. The only reason to do this was because "in the old days", customers would pull an older-generation drive out of the library and replace it with a newer one, and sell the old drive cheaply.

I can't answer your question about a "good library" without knowing how much data you need to back up, your concerns about cost of media, and so on. Personally, I used a Dell TL4000 (which is a badge-engineered IBM TS3200) library with 48 slots and a LTO-4 drive.
 
One best practice I would suggest is to go for the best support you can, irrespective of vendor.

Waiting a week for a new LTO drive to ship after your datacenter has burned down is not something you want to be doing, for instance.

Ditto for running the gauntlet with no backups if your autoloader blows up because your vendor response time is not good enough.

In a similar vein: I would not recommend mixing and matching vendors with drives/libraries. Why? Finger pointing. You don't want vendor A to blame vendor B's device and vice versa.

Dell server support where I am is exceptional, we run a TL2000 autoloader, but not directly from FreeBSD.
 
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