My new autoloader arrived today... now with a preliminary benchmark

[Goosemaster]

FYI we are upgrading from a VXA...:evil:

Just benchmarked it and I am getting 42.7MB/s from an array to tape🙁 FYI my HDD arrays (10 to 10) are doing 100MB/s to each other right now and I was hoping to match that🙁

Ultrium4:
04/17 20:30:21 Kb copied : 1433216
04/17 20:30:21 Total time : 0.6 minutes
04/17 20:30:21 Throughput : 2563.358 mb/min

I have a good feeling that the scsi drivers are at fault.🙁
I am using an LTO-3 tape however but still🙁 The current source is a 1TB SATA RAID0 array (adding two more drives to make it a 10 tomorrow😀)

I ran some larger benchmarks (> 10GB) and the speed only increases to 43MB/s🙁

 

[MotF Bane]

There's a thread that needs updating.

 

[Ns1]

Those LTO's are HOT

 

[xanis]

Originally posted by: MotF Bane
There's a thread that needs updating.

this

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: MotF Bane
There's a thread that needs updating.

It's all explained in my latest book: Fight the man.

$19.95 while supplies last.

 

[hiromizu]

long live the tape. we moved to site replicated emc last year and it's just amazing.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: hiromizu
long live the tape. we moved to site replicated emc last year and it's just amazing.

we were doing D2D2D and it is a pain for us (small to medium ) plus no where near as reliable.

I agree that site2site would be a dream for DR🙂

 

[hiromizu]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: hiromizu
long live the tape. we moved to site replicated emc last year and it's just amazing.

we were doing D2D2D and it is a pain for us (small to medium ) plus no where near as reliable.

I agree that site2site would be a dream for DR🙂

what were the problems you were experiencing and what hardware/software were you using?

 

[LtPage1]

Did you get the tow package?

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: hiromizu

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: hiromizu
long live the tape. we moved to site replicated emc last year and it's just amazing.

we were doing D2D2D and it is a pain for us (small to medium ) plus no where near as reliable.

I agree that site2site would be a dream for DR🙂

what were the problems you were experiencing and what hardware/software were you using?

The 2D methodology was simply not robust and fault tolerant enough for our needs. Such a large amount of sessions are stored on a single media in 2D that loss of a single piece of media could void months worth of backups in a single drop. While that wouldn't affect live data, the loss would be monumental should the backups be needed. In addition, we were still using tape for backups older than 4 months. Finally, our backup software requires that all file systems devices be active when for certain uncommon operations which was not a method-killer but the annoyance was there.This of course glosses over the physical benefits of tape over removable disk or disk cartridges.

Call it to much of a good thing, but the density that disk offered was more of negative in the end. Upgrading the library took care of all of these issues so it was the clear choice.

I have to use arcserve as the licensing was already arranged for before I started working here. While the older versions (11 and before) were epic POS (garbage), 11.5 through r12 SP1 have grown on me. While it isn't Backup Exec it does everything we need really well for a decent price.

As for why we moved to 2D in the first place, it was part of a long standing transition I had in place. Initially we were using about 4 tapes a night at 12/24MBps and we need capacity and speed as our server count grew. Upon 2 months of working here backups were running 700% faster but that was not enough. 2D provided capacity and speed at a price tape couldn't match (2 years ago) in our price range.

This transition includes our immediate transition to LTO-3 and to LTO-4 for Vmware VCB in the future.

 

[hiromizu]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: hiromizu

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: hiromizu
long live the tape. we moved to site replicated emc last year and it's just amazing.

we were doing D2D2D and it is a pain for us (small to medium ) plus no where near as reliable.

I agree that site2site would be a dream for DR🙂

what were the problems you were experiencing and what hardware/software were you using?

The 2D methodology was simply not robust and fault tolerant enough for our needs. Such a large amount of sessions are stored on a single media in 2D that loss of a single piece of media could void months worth of backups in a single drop. While that wouldn't affect live data, the loss would be monumental should the backups be needed. In addition, we were still using tape for backups older than 4 months. Finally, our backup software requires that all file systems devices be active when for certain uncommon operations which was not a method-killer but the annoyance was there.This of course glosses over the physical benefits of tape over removable disk or disk cartridges.

Call it to much of a good thing, but the density that disk offered was more of negative in the end. Upgrading the library took care of all of these issues so it was the clear choice.

I have to use arcserve as the licensing was already arranged for before I started working here. While the older versions (11 and before) were epic POS (garbage), 11.5 through r12 SP1 have grown on me. While it isn't Backup Exec it does everything we need really well for a decent price.

As for why we moved to 2D in the first place, it was part of a long standing transition I had in place. Initially we were using about 4 tapes a night at 12/24MBps and we need capacity and speed as our server count grew. Upon 2 months of working here backups were running 700% faster but that was not enough. 2D provided capacity and speed at a price tape couldn't match (2 years ago) in our price range.

This transition includes our immediate transition to LTO-3 and to LTO-4 for Vmware VCB in the future.

What type of disk media were you backing up to that wasn't fault tolerant? I hate Arcserve.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: hiromizu

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: hiromizu

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: hiromizu
long live the tape. we moved to site replicated emc last year and it's just amazing.

we were doing D2D2D and it is a pain for us (small to medium ) plus no where near as reliable.

I agree that site2site would be a dream for DR🙂

what were the problems you were experiencing and what hardware/software were you using?

The 2D methodology was simply not robust and fault tolerant enough for our needs. Such a large amount of sessions are stored on a single media in 2D that loss of a single piece of media could void months worth of backups in a single drop. While that wouldn't affect live data, the loss would be monumental should the backups be needed. In addition, we were still using tape for backups older than 4 months. Finally, our backup software requires that all file systems devices be active when for certain uncommon operations which was not a method-killer but the annoyance was there.This of course glosses over the physical benefits of tape over removable disk or disk cartridges.

Call it to much of a good thing, but the density that disk offered was more of negative in the end. Upgrading the library took care of all of these issues so it was the clear choice.

I have to use arcserve as the licensing was already arranged for before I started working here. While the older versions (11 and before) were epic POS (garbage), 11.5 through r12 SP1 have grown on me. While it isn't Backup Exec it does everything we need really well for a decent price.

As for why we moved to 2D in the first place, it was part of a long standing transition I had in place. Initially we were using about 4 tapes a night at 12/24MBps and we need capacity and speed as our server count grew. Upon 2 months of working here backups were running 700% faster but that was not enough. 2D provided capacity and speed at a price tape couldn't match (2 years ago) in our price range.

This transition includes our immediate transition to LTO-3 and to LTO-4 for Vmware VCB in the future.

What type of disk media were you backing up to that wasn't fault tolerant? I hate Arcserve.

Off the shelf HDDs. Hate arcserve all you want, but i had no choice and it successfully restored exchange for us once before so it's paid for itself already.

One day we'll move to Vault + BE12 but not soon🙁 It was supposed to be this year but the market tanked🙁

 

[SoulAssassin]

I win, I have two more expansion cabinets for my i2000 sitting on my loading dock. Takes us up to 1200 licensed slots...18 LTO4's...and that doesn't count the 4 other libraries.

http://www.quantum.com/Product...Scalari2000/Index.aspx

Oh and if that didn't buy me enough geek points, I have another 22TB of disk for my dedupe VTL sitting right next to the libraries. I'm going to be busy for the next couple weeks. 🙂

http://www.quantum.com/Product...kup/DXi7500/Index.aspx


BTW, Netbackup ftmfw.

 

[SoulAssassin]

Also, if you are in any type of financial services industry you really should encrypt that LTO4.

 

[Goosemaster]

Soul,

Very nice toys you have there😀

As I said we are small/med so VTL's, like dedup, are pipedreams for us😛
We are being lean and mean:evil:

As for encryption, I've been doing AES in sofware for years now. As i stated, I will initially be transitioning to LTO-3 so I'll be sticking to software until we get some Ultrium 4's

FYI:at my last job they used to back at backup at least 60TB nightly😀

 

[Red Squirrel]

We have LTO2's at work. What a POS system, well at least for our environment. We need LTO4's and Veritas stat! Tivoli without any training really sucks to use.

I was actually thinking of getting a simple LTO tape drive for home backups, until I realized how expensive the drive and tapes are. 😱 Hard drives and an external dock are cheaper.

We also have a huge sun tape library in our server room but it's not ours. It's pretty cool to watch that robot arm move around inside. It can hold something like 600 tapes.

 

[Goosemaster]

From your experiences, do you find any diferences in compressability between software and hardware encryption?

Also, VXA sucks.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
We have LTO2's at work. What a POS system, well at least for our environment. We need LTO4's and Veritas stat! Tivoli without any training really sucks to use.

I was actually thinking of getting a simple LTO tape drive for home backups, until I realized how expensive the drive and tapes are. 😱 Hard drives and an external dock are cheaper.

We also have a huge sun tape library in our server room but it's not ours. It's pretty cool to watch that robot arm move around inside. It can hold something like 600 tapes.

you're complaining about Tivoli:Q

 

[Red Squirrel]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
We have LTO2's at work. What a POS system, well at least for our environment. We need LTO4's and Veritas stat! Tivoli without any training really sucks to use.

I was actually thinking of getting a simple LTO tape drive for home backups, until I realized how expensive the drive and tapes are. 😱 Hard drives and an external dock are cheaper.

We also have a huge sun tape library in our server room but it's not ours. It's pretty cool to watch that robot arm move around inside. It can hold something like 600 tapes.

you're complaining about Tivoli:Q

Is it actually considered a good system?

We had zero training on it, and the guy from IBM said we really should get training, so that really does not help. It constantly runs out of scratch tapes, but think that's more of a scalability thing then anything. We should be using bigger tapes or a better designed setup (bigger library maybe?). Backing up* about 40 servers.

We'll be switching over soon though. I just need to make sure the exchange backups run or the log drive runs out of space. Can't delete those logs without a backup running. Well, you, CAN, but it's not good. 😛



Fine print: *Backing up refers to the fact that jobs are setup, but not whether they are actually running. 😛

 

[Red Squirrel]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster
From your experiences, do you find any diferences in compressability between software and hardware encryption?

Not sure tbh, in fact I don't even think we are using compression at all, which may be part of the problem I stated about scratch tapes. 😛 I have not bothered to get to know the system too much as it will be changed soon. Right now we're just crossing our fingers hoping nothing craps out since we probably wont have backups or know how to restore LOL.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
We have LTO2's at work. What a POS system, well at least for our environment. We need LTO4's and Veritas stat! Tivoli without any training really sucks to use.

I was actually thinking of getting a simple LTO tape drive for home backups, until I realized how expensive the drive and tapes are. 😱 Hard drives and an external dock are cheaper.

We also have a huge sun tape library in our server room but it's not ours. It's pretty cool to watch that robot arm move around inside. It can hold something like 600 tapes.

you're complaining about Tivoli:Q

Is it actually considered a good system?

We had zero training on it, and the guy from IBM said we really should get training, so that really does not help. It constantly runs out of scratch tapes, but think that's more of a scalability thing then anything. We should be using bigger tapes or a better designed setup (bigger library maybe?). Backing up* about 40 servers.

We'll be switching over soon though. I just need to make sure the exchange backups run or the log drive runs out of space. Can't delete those logs without a backup running. Well, you, CAN, but it's not good. 😛



Fine print: *Backing up refers to the fact that jobs are setup, but not whether they are actually running. 😛

Tivoli is amazing from what our backup manager showed me at my old job. As for running out of scratch tapes, that's an issue with your config and hardware. You have to plan out the configs for the media pools and save sets so that you know how much media you will need before hand. I could see this cropping up without an appropriate number of slots though.

For example I use GFS so I know from day one how many backups I will have at any given time.... the number of tapes however, that is another story😛

As for your Tlogs, you're damn right that you you backup before deleting the tlogs. I used to mess around with things like brick level backups ( a mistake for which I have sicne repented) and stuff but that took too long and kept the live data next to the backups for way too long....13hrs for ~100GB.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel

Originally posted by: Goosemaster
From your experiences, do you find any diferences in compressability between software and hardware encryption?

Not sure tbh, in fact I don't even think we are using compression at all, which may be part of the problem I stated about scratch tapes. 😛 I have not bothered to get to know the system too much as it will be changed soon. Right now we're just crossing our fingers hoping nothing craps out since we probably wont have backups or know how to restore LOL.

In general I don't depend on compression* since it really every applies but a short discussion had me thinking:

I wonder if my software compresses the data before encrypting it and whether that would apply on the drive as well (both encryption and compression handled by either the drive or the software) so that it could be written efficiently on the tape.

* I test the data before I rely on compression. So far our IBM VXA's (Excrix/Tandberg) showed little if any compression at all when using software encryption [which was expected].

 

[SoulAssassin]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel

Originally posted by: Goosemaster
From your experiences, do you find any diferences in compressability between software and hardware encryption?

Not sure tbh, in fact I don't even think we are using compression at all, which may be part of the problem I stated about scratch tapes. 😛 I have not bothered to get to know the system too much as it will be changed soon. Right now we're just crossing our fingers hoping nothing craps out since we probably wont have backups or know how to restore LOL.

In general I don't depend on compression* since it really every applies but a short discussion had me thinking:

I wonder if my software compresses the data before encrypting it and whether that would apply on the drive as well (both encryption and compression handled by either the drive or the software) so that it could be written efficiently on the tape.

* I test the data before I rely on compression. So far our IBM VXA's (Excrix/Tandberg) showed little if any compression at all when using software encryption [which was expected].

Software compression is generally a bad idea, usually (at least in Netbackup) it's compressed at the client before it's sent on the LAN (initially a good thing) but that puts a load on the client (very bad on production servers) and it usually reduces hardware compression you would already be getting (also bad). The one time you really want to do it is if you are doing WAN backups. Encryption generally creates a lot of unique data and doesn't compress well. We average about 1.5TB on an LTO4 which is 800GB native/1.6TB compressed using the native encryption.

I was kinda bragging earlier but in all seriousness I've done enterprise backups at some of the largest financial service companies in the world and worked as a subcontractor for Symantec doing Netbackup. If you have any enterprise backup questions just ask.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: SoulAssassin

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel

Originally posted by: Goosemaster
From your experiences, do you find any diferences in compressability between software and hardware encryption?

Not sure tbh, in fact I don't even think we are using compression at all, which may be part of the problem I stated about scratch tapes. 😛 I have not bothered to get to know the system too much as it will be changed soon. Right now we're just crossing our fingers hoping nothing craps out since we probably wont have backups or know how to restore LOL.

In general I don't depend on compression* since it really every applies but a short discussion had me thinking:

I wonder if my software compresses the data before encrypting it and whether that would apply on the drive as well (both encryption and compression handled by either the drive or the software) so that it could be written efficiently on the tape.

* I test the data before I rely on compression. So far our IBM VXA's (Excrix/Tandberg) showed little if any compression at all when using software encryption [which was expected].

Software compression is generally a bad idea, usually (at least in Netbackup) it's compressed at the client before it's sent on the LAN (initially a good thing) but that puts a load on the client (very bad on production servers) and it usually reduces hardware compression you would already be getting (also bad). The one time you really want to do it is if you are doing WAN backups. Encryption generally creates a lot of unique data and doesn't compress well. We average about 1.5TB on an LTO4 which is 800GB native/1.6TB compressed using the native encryption.

I was kinda bragging earlier but in all seriousness I've done enterprise backups at some of the largest financial service companies in the world and worked as a subcontractor for Symantec doing Netbackup. If you have any enterprise backup questions just ask.

I was aware of the lack of comrpession that pre-encrypted data faced and am glad to see you are getting close to 1:1 on those bad boys. with hardware compression. As we go hardware encryption will always be available but I had not expected such an easter egg😀
Frankly, I'm coming from VXA's which averaged .7:1 😕 with the encryption and comrpession done in software.

that's at ~$70 a pop:Q for x23's(160GB/320GB). Needless to say my cost analysis an projections made for very easy procurement approval.

We are only 24/7 a few times a year so nightly agent-based compression is a non-issue at this time.


I'll definitely keep your offer in mind🙂


I can't wait to benchmark this sucker this week😀

 

[Arkaign]

Did anyone else enter this thread hoping that this was about a beltfeeder for a minigun?