Upgrade advice needed

[Vince Laurent]

We currently have an MSL 6050 with 4 LTO drives. It is a Storage Works 4/40 setup. We have so many systems that all 4 drives are busy from end of day to the next morning. Now I got word that more systems are coming on line and therefore I need to look at some possible upgrading.

What might be a better tape library? What is the fastest drive out there? We have gigabit ethernet from the servers to the tape library so our backup right now are FAST but I'd like them FASTER. I was even thinking of putting a disk array in front of the tape library to do a disk to disk then to tape sequence.

Any help would be greatly aprpeciated.
Thanks!
Vince

[Ivan Ferreira]

If you want to go faster than GB Ethernet, then you should start thinking in a SAN based backup solution with Virtual Libraries or LTO Ultrium 3 DRIVES.

[Peter Godron]

Vince,
as an alternative, have you looked at reducing the amount of data to be backed up?

When we did a review, we found the users wanted evertything backing up, but most of the files did not change, so we switched to incremental and freed up lost of backup time.

[Vince Laurent]

Peter,
Unfortunately it is our SAP environment and these are Oracle On-line backups as well as Unix file system backups. I could save a bit of time doing incremntal for the unix file system level but those are already under 30 minutes - most under 15.

-vince

[Marino Meloni_1]

A two stage backup using a VLS (virtual library) may help with the backup windows, but for performance and capacity I would suggest to buy a second library to add at the first one, or go directly to a ready to expand solution like an esl-e or eml where you can add drive in the future