Role of tape (lol) drives in a modern datacentre

Just thinking out loud really, but what does everyone use these days? We currently use LTO5 in an autoloader, but as the business grows, the amount of data seems to grow exponentially and there will come a time sooner rather than later where it won't cut it any longer. On a daily basis, I am taking out and putting in a comical amount of fresh media, so much so, I've jokingly asked for a shopping basket.

Is the only option going to be hard disk backup or cloud storage?

Also, what does everyone use in regards software? I've been asked to evaluate Nova backup, but it seems hugely expensive for just 4 servers. I've used backup exec in the past and it was fine for my needs then. The other piece of software that was suggested was crashplan.

Your thoughts?

In this age of crypto, nothing beats removable media for security.

You currently use LTO 5 which is 1.5TB - LTO 7 is 6TB RAW and has better compression. Worth looking at upgrading?

The future for tapes looks crazy. LTO-8 12.8TB, LTO-9 26TB, LTO-10 48TB.
Like nutcase said, you can't really beat tapes

At some point you will have to look at disk. Tape speeds are not increasing as fast as their volume is - at some point you will just not be able to complete daily backups to them in a timely fashion.

We still use tape for our Monthly and Yearly archive backups, but they are no longer suitable as a primary target for our backups.

We use EMC Networker backing up to a Data Domain appliance (which replicates to an identical appliance at our other site).
Then each month the latest full backup is run off to one of our tape libraries.

we use a mixture hear.
we have a service provider that allows use to:
1) Backup over the intenet
2) backup to tape / tapes go offsite va 3rd party company
3) backup to harddisk for staging then back up to tape / tapes go offsite va 3rd party company

depending on our office size / data volume and data change rate will depend on the solution we use in the offices.
but we have a number of autoloaders for different parts of the company. Overland and Dell. with mixed media
for our tapes rotation we use a : son - Farhter - gandfather tape system
with full backsups each month kept off site for 3 months.

have have used Backup exec
and now use Comvaut

Disk to disk to tape. Tape is great for archive and backup retention.

Veeam to 36TB DAS with retention jobs configured to send data to another off-site DAS for archiving. We did have tapes but 3 tape drives were running into the working day, we just didn't have enough of a backup window to do D2D2T.

Commvault. D2D then replicate backup to alternate datacenter, then off to tape. Currently LTO5 drives, 6 in each library. Money in next years budget to replace both libraries, not sure what with as it's currently powervault ml6030 I think. Could fancy a change to something else though.

Liquidfox said:

Veeam to 36TB DAS with retention jobs configured to send data to another off-site DAS for archiving. We did have tapes but 3 tape drives were running into the working day, we just didn't have enough of a backup window to do D2D2T.

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Surely the D2D needs to be done in the window but the D2T can "overrun" as it shouldn't be using production hardware?

So after two weeks, nova have still not gotten back to me.

I have rationalized what gets backed up, but still require something better than Cobian (yes I know) backup software. We are backing up from 4 physical servers and 5 virtual servers (these are backed up with Veem) to a dedicated backup server with 10Tb of storage and this will be replicated onto an off site server doing the same thing. At the moment, I have been given Cobian to use, but its so slow its not funny.

What do others recommend? I've used backupexec in the past, but its pricing is not straightforward.

I've used BackupExec and NetBackup. I've used NetBackup more because I've predominantly worked with UNIX (Solaris) machines over the past 5 or so years.

nutcase_1uk said:

Surely the D2D needs to be done in the window but the D2T can "overrun" as it shouldn't be using production hardware?

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We were approaching the end of the working day before completion of one of the tape drives if things didn't go perfectly smoothly.

ShadowProtect, IMageManager, and Asigra.

Liquidfox said:

We were approaching the end of the working day before completion of one of the tape drives if things didn't go perfectly smoothly.

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Oh ok. The limit on mine is the network. Full backup copy to tape is taking about 6 hours (~2.1TB) but should be able to shave about an hour off when I get the downtime to put the 10Gbe NIC in the last part of the chain.

The problem with tapes are they're much slower, and are still task intensive.

I support a D2D backup appliance from one of the major players in the market, so i would say i'm biased to disk - however facts speak for themselves.

As for ISV's, the major players tend to be Veeam, Veritas (NBU/BE) and DataProtector.

Most of the larger customers i work with (we're talking 10-30 Pb's of usable storage) are big fans of Veeam - it's expensive, but it just works well.

I must admit I've never used Veeam at enterprise level, I've only mucked about with it at home, but from that little experience I can tell it's a lot nicer to use than NBU which isn't exactly user friendly.

Dooksy said:

I must admit I've never used Veeam at enterprise level, I've only mucked about with it at home, but from that little experience I can tell it's a lot nicer to use than NBU which isn't exactly user friendly.

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You should try DP if you don't think NBU is user friendly.