I'm currently spec'ing out a tape archival solution for a group that wants to use Final Cut Server as a video editing asset manager.
I'm planning on using a Solaris/ZFS pool as the main online storage pool for FCS. What I'd like to be able to do is to archive assets off to tape that are older than 2 years (for example). FCS itself doesn't have any concept of tape drives, but it can mount different network storage pools (either over FC, iSCSI, CIFS etc.) and I can script within it to move assets older than a certain period of time between different storage pools.
I saw a demo of a product called XenData, which runs on a windows box with a tape library plugged into it. It presents a windows shared directory over the network, and basically takes anything that's written to that dir and dumps it to tape. Anything that's requested from that dir, it then pulls from tape. You can also set up rules to maintain a disk-cache, so that archived files requested often are kept on both local disk as well as tape. The nice thing about that is that clients don't care that it's a tape drive, it just looks like a high-latency windows share. The problem is that it's Windows-only.
Are there any other bits of tape archive software out there that work in a similar way? I've looked at things like Backup Exec, but that seems to be more geared to a multiple-system / agent software approach, rather than something more centralised.
I'm planning on using a Solaris/ZFS pool as the main online storage pool for FCS. What I'd like to be able to do is to archive assets off to tape that are older than 2 years (for example). FCS itself doesn't have any concept of tape drives, but it can mount different network storage pools (either over FC, iSCSI, CIFS etc.) and I can script within it to move assets older than a certain period of time between different storage pools.
I saw a demo of a product called XenData, which runs on a windows box with a tape library plugged into it. It presents a windows shared directory over the network, and basically takes anything that's written to that dir and dumps it to tape. Anything that's requested from that dir, it then pulls from tape. You can also set up rules to maintain a disk-cache, so that archived files requested often are kept on both local disk as well as tape. The nice thing about that is that clients don't care that it's a tape drive, it just looks like a high-latency windows share. The problem is that it's Windows-only.
Are there any other bits of tape archive software out there that work in a similar way? I've looked at things like Backup Exec, but that seems to be more geared to a multiple-system / agent software approach, rather than something more centralised.
