D2D120 with External Tape drive.

[emjayro]

I'd like to implement a D2D120 box offloading to tape, without throwing away my recent investment in an external Quantum LTO-2 SCSI tape drive.

HP quickspecs unsurprisingly only HP tape drives supported, but i'd like to know if anyone has got other drives working and what my chances are.

Also can't work out if i need the Protector Express software (backing up 4 servers), or can just stick with ntbackup or similar.

[Santhosh D]

Hi,

LTO technology is same with all the organizations like HP, IBM & Quantom.

And any Tape Drive can be connected to the D2D120 and make sure you connect the Tape Drive which is emulated in the D2D.

For eg: If you have emulated LTO3 Drive in D2D, then connect the LTO 3 External Standalone Drive.

Once you connect it, you have 2 options to Offload (Backup) Data.

1) Backup Data from D2D RMI Utility.

- You can just open the RMI Utility of the D2D and click on Configuration under 'Tape Attach' option. This will make sure if the Tape device which you have attached is detected by D2D.
- Click on Copy/Export/Import Option and then you will get a Window where you can select the Catridge (which is already emulated) to COPY (Backup to the attached Tape)
- Select that and that should be able to Backup or Offload the Data.

2) You can also use Backup softwares like:

Atempo Time Navigator 4
BakBone NetVault 7.4
CA ARCserver 11.5
CommVault Galaxy Backup and Recovery
EMC NetWorker 7.3.x
EMC Retrospect 7.5
HP Data Protector Express 4.0
HP Data Protector 6.0
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.4.2
Native Backup (tar, cpio, dd)
Oracle Secure Backup 10.2
Symantec Backup Exec 12d
Symantec NetBackup 6.5
Symantec NetBackup 6.0
Yosemite Backup 8.5
Windows NT Backup

NOTE: If you are using the Symantec Backup Exec 10d software application, you need to install an iSCSI host bus adapter for each iSCSI host (or server) for the HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System or an upgrade to Symantec Backup exec 12d.

[D Wong]

Hi Emjoyro:

The D2D120 does not use any backup software to copy the virtual autoloader tape drive cartridge to a physical tape. There is a web gui on the D2D box that can schedule copy jobs of your disk based tape cartridges to physical tape attached to the D2D.

You do however, use whatever backup application software to backup your data to virtual tape device on the D2D.

Regards,
Dave W.

[emjayro]

Next step....

Having bought a D2D120 device, I have to say i'm very dissapointed. What appears to be an excellent product has some major shortfalls that I hope HP will address in future releases.

Firstly, if you use NTBackup to backup your servers (as a lot of smaller businesses do), each server can only backup to a 'Tape Drive' as opposed to an 'Autoloader' (autoloaders not supported with NTBackup).

This doesn't seem to bad at first until you realise this 'Tape Drive' only has one tape in it that you cannot change, not even manually through the web GUI. So if i'm backing up 2 servers, i'm only able to use 400Gb of my 1.5TB of storage, and cannot manually rotate tapes as I would have using a physical tape drive to utilise more space.

Secondly, I cannot consolidate my virtual tape backups onto larger physical media backups, i.e. if I have 5 servers backing up 40Gb each, I can't back them up onto a single 200Gb tape, but have to do 5 separate backups to 5 tapes.

Having already invested in a solution I thought would make backups a whole lot easier and cheaper in the long run, I'm now faced with having to spend more money licensing HP Data Protector Express for my servers, and spend far more money on backup tapes as i'll need separate tapes for each server I backup, not one to cover the lot as hoped.

[MajidNX]

The current firmware of D2D only supports spanning one Virtual cartridge on to many however it doesn't support the other way round.
That is a product limitation as of now