Need advice in picking a tape drive system.

[OrangeDoor]

I need to purchase a tape drive that will backup 100gb+ (compressed). It will be connected to a Windows Server 2003 machine. Right now I'm just looking at the options, cost isn't a major consideration. I have very little experience with tapes, and what I do have is with the older DAT system that doesn't have enough capacity now. It will be setup to do a 3-tape circular routine.

VXA-2: Seems like a great value. Not the fastest, but from what I've read it's the most fault tolerant. My concern is that it's not widely used. Mainly supplied just by Exabyte (the company that made the standard) along with a few OEMs. Price ~$1500

LTO and SDLT: Most widely adopted it seems. Faster than VXA but costs much more. Comes in much larger capacities, but that's not an issue. I've been looking at drives by IBM and HP. Price ~$4500.

I would really appreciate any information, advice, or recommendations from people experienced with tape drives.

 

[eastvillager]

You're really talking about two different classes of tape backup.

VXA-2 is midrange, and if midrange tape meets your requirements, VXA-2 is your best option at this point, imho. It is proprietary tech, but most tape is, when you get right down to it.

SDLT and LTO are both 'enterprise' class, with higher performance, higher capacity, and consequently higher prices. Between the two, I choose LTO. LTO, unlike most tape tech is not proprietary. If you do go LTO, HP is making better drives than IBM, imho, at this point in time. LTO had some serious teething pains with the first gen, but most if not all of them have been ironed out. I haven't put in SDLT for a customer in a long time. Even when customers have a significant SDLT investment, I push to migrate their existing backup catalog to LTO media. With LTO and SDLT---and any 'enterprise' class tape---you've got to be careful putting the host platform together. If you don't design a system that can keep the drives fed, you're wasting your investment, and in some cases actually reducing the life of the drives and/or media.

For what you're doing, VXA-2 looks like a good fit, especially if you're going one drive and the speed from one drive can meet your backup/restore window requirements. It is easier to get the most out of a VXA-2 drive without specifically designing your host platform with tape operations in mind---one advantage of midrange over enterprise, especially in a smaller shop where you might not have the time/money to do significant performance analysis/tuning/testing of your backup platform.

 

[OrangeDoor]

Thanks, that's helpful. I didn't know about:

If you don't design a system that can keep the drives fed, you're wasting your investment, and in some cases actually reducing the life of the drives and/or media.

I will research setting up tape backup systems to see what it entails and whether it would be better suited for our purposes.

If you have any links or books you'd recommend on the topic that'd be helpful. What software do you recommend? TapeWare is what I have some experience with.