LTO-4 Drive Recommendation?

[Jamsan]

Our current LTO-2 auto loader is starting to shit the bed, and we're out of a valid service contract and Overland wants us to pay for the repair, then pay another $2,000 after the repair to get it back under valid maintenance. For another $2,000 and cost of new media, we can upgrade to LTO-4, which is the path we're deciding to go down. Our backups are taking quite some time now (on average 12-14 hours with the verify - full backups) and are stretching out to 2 LTO-2 tapes as well. It's time for a tape refresh as well, so we'd be spending less on tape media to help offset some of the cost for the expense of the new unit..

Anyways - does anyone have any good recommendations on specific autoloader LTO-4 units? We'd need atleast 1 drive with a minimum of 7 slot magazine. We don't really have the need for the possibility to upgrade to a 2nd drive in the life of this product, so single drive is fine. If you can't recommend any specific models, any good brands to stick with / stay away from is helpful as well. Overland? Tandberg? Quantum? Dell? HP? I'm at a loss with all the different brands/features/etc. available on the hundreds of models available. Are there any specific features/performance capabilities I should look for when picking out a model?

Lastly - Anyone have any good recommendation on good media? Fuji? IBM? Maxell? TDK? Quantum? Sony? Tandberg?

 

[drebo]

I've always had good luck with HP branded drives and media. I've had failures from Dell on both fronts.

My recommendation would be the HP StorageWorks drives. Media is so cheap now that it's kind of irrelevant.

 

[Agamar]

My Dell 124T has been pretty good. Mine is the LTO3 version, but the LTO4 version is out now. I have both tape magazines installed, for a total of 16 tapes. This allows me to keep a lot of backups on site longer before rotation.

The unit has had problems twice, but Dell replaced it next day and it wasn't a big deal to pop the magazines out and pop them into the new unit. My unit cost $4k when it was new (2 years ago)

 

[sonoma1993]

Originally posted by: Jamsan
Our current LTO-2 auto loader is starting to shit the bed, and we're out of a valid service contract and Overland wants us to pay for the repair, then pay another $2,000 after the repair to get it back under valid maintenance. For another $2,000 and cost of new media, we can upgrade to LTO-4, which is the path we're deciding to go down. Our backups are taking quite some time now (on average 12-14 hours with the verify - full backups) and are stretching out to 2 LTO-2 tapes as well. It's time for a tape refresh as well, so we'd be spending less on tape media to help offset some of the cost for the expense of the new unit..

Anyways - does anyone have any good recommendations on specific autoloader LTO-4 units? We'd need atleast 1 drive with a minimum of 7 slot magazine. We don't really have the need for the possibility to upgrade to a 2nd drive in the life of this product, so single drive is fine. If you can't recommend any specific models, any good brands to stick with / stay away from is helpful as well. Overland? Tandberg? Quantum? Dell? HP? I'm at a loss with all the different brands/features/etc. available on the hundreds of models available. Are there any specific features/performance capabilities I should look for when picking out a model?

Lastly - Anyone have any good recommendation on good media? Fuji? IBM? Maxell? TDK? Quantum? Sony? Tandberg?

When I was working at my old job, one of our customers. We set them up with a Quantum Superloader 3. It can hold upto 8 to 16 tapes. It rather easy to use as well. Not sure if Quantum sell one that currently supports LTo4 though.

 

[cmetz]

I've had very bad experiences with Quantum and with Dell (tape drives in particular, and in general).
I've had good experiences with HP (tape drives in particular, and in general). And with IBM tape drives.

Are you sure you want tape? As far as I can tell, they're becoming more and more niche products. SATA drives in a VTL or NAS make a great alternative for many sites. I used to have the tape religion, but lately I've had great luck with SATA nearline disks as a replacement. Off-site? Just throw a VTL in some colo. Testing the job? Much easier. Archive? Just put the drive in a good vibration shell (like Seagate's packaging) and hand it to your archive company.

I won't say that disk can replace all tape applications, but I will say you should ask the question.

 

[Jamsan]

+2 for HP, +/- 0 for Quantum, -1 for Dell.

Anyone have any experience with Tandberg stuff? I saw this one in particular, and it's got all the features the others have and is a good price point (great price point, actually).

 

[drebo]

I've used Tandberg's LTO2 stuff, and it was OK...no real problems, and their tech support was very knowledgable in helping resolve a strange issue... If you use Windows Server 2k with a certain version of BackupEXEC and a certain revision of tape drive, you can't use an LSI HBA...but once they helped us figure that out, the drive worked fine.

My vote still goes to HP, just because I like them as a company FAR more than I like either Quantum or Dell. Being an HP VAR and a Dell Premier Partner, I can tell you sincerely that I will never recommend Dell's business products to anyone ever again. The only reason we remain a partner is because we get great pricing on peripherals. System pricing, support, and stability have become a huge, huge problem in the past year or so, prompting us to shift ALL of our premanufactured PC and server sales over to HP. I, personally, couldn't be happier.

 

[heymrdj]

Ok i'm not into corporate business ect, so I may sounds like a total idiot here, so please just bear with me.

Why tape? What does it offer? If you want offsite perhaps hot swap 1TB SATA HD's? Cheap? more space than tap? Easy to initiate into almost any infrastucture. Can be onsite or offsite stored.

 

[drebo]

LTO-4 drives cost roughly $40 each and store up to 1.6TB of data. They are far, FAR more cost-effective when doing long-term archiving, which many businesses and government entities required. It's also typically much faster. I have one client (who's a government contractor of sorts) who needs to backup nightly and store weekly and monthly backups off-site indefinitely. That's over 60 tapes per year. SATA drives might do the trick, but they won't last as long as tape and they are roughly 2-4 times the cost of the LTO-2 tapes they use.

For our smaller, less needy clients, we have them alternate two USB hard drives. Disk-based backups have their place, but there are many situations where the benefits of tape media make it a CLEAR winner over disk-based backups. I'll admit that the falling cost of hard drives is closing the gap, but certain instances demand the use of tape, and, to be honest, software hasn't quite caught up yet. BackupEXEC's management of disk-based backup media is absolutely terrible. NovaNET's getting there, but it's still not nearly as robust as tape. Also, there are certain things like WORM and the like.

Me, personally, I would prefer to see a mixture. I'm a big fan of BackupEXEC CPS (Continuous Protection Server). Basically, it uses VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) to take a backup of every single file you change. It's great for archiving versions, and if So-and-So deletes his Excel spreadsheet, retrieving the last saved version is as simple as a web search. Combine this with nightly snapshots to tape and you've got a very robust backup solution.

 

[sunnyc]

You might want to take a look at IBM's TS2900. It's a 9 slot tape library, LTO 3 or 4, with max 7.2TB.

 

[imagoon]

Originally posted by: Jamsan
+2 for HP, +/- 0 for Quantum, -1 for Dell.

Anyone have any experience with Tandberg stuff? I saw this one in particular, and it's got all the features the others have and is a good price point (great price point, actually).

Here: Dell 132T LTO3 23 tapes. No errors that were not my own fault. I have 90 dell tapes, only one is dead, related to that "my own fault" issue. The Dell labels that come in the tape cart like to statically attach to the tape cart. I loaded the machine and missed that one was there and the tape drive loaded it with the labels and jammed. Dell tape died because I slipped while removing the label. In mine they use IBM drives.

All other issues have been backup exec random screw ups. IE one day it decided the changer was actually a stand alone disk etc.

~Chris