high available Tape Drives

[Ranjith_5]

Hi Pradeep,

Kindly explain about the infracture, where u areplanning to implement this type of library. You can go for it only if the site is mission critical, with a lot of high class enterprise level servers. Other wise you wont be able to utilize the library in its full efficiency.

If you can give a brief overview on ur setup, I hope people can make a better suggestion on this.

regards,
Syam

[Pradeep_25]

Hi syam,

i am thinking of a mission critical enterprise server (mobile phone billing server, NASDAQ transation station - i am not aware of the architecture details how the machines are built, but backup should be happening on those servers) with EVA or Higher storage array attachments.

Virtual Tape storage is not new. There are some virtual Tape Libraries too ( StorageTek SN6000). But SN6000 is connected to physical tape library for tape backup.

Virtual Tape Library i am thinking is a Tape Emulation on hard disk drives. May be EVA/EMA/VA/Cimetrix emulating Tape Drives out of backend FATA disk drives.

what i get is a High end Tape library with lots of Virtual tape drives(up to EVA max Lun fan out) and storage capacity max supported ( FATA 300 GB X 270 drives).

would it be any good ?? faster drive availability, faster backup.. No Library (robot) errors, less maintanance cost

if we add multy pathing to the same, we can see an Enterprise class Tape Library with High availability..

would this be any good??

[Ranjith_5]

Hi Pradeep,

You mean backup on another SAN?

But in this case the you will need to keep this disk storage @ a different physical location. You should keep this atleast 500m away from the data centre in a campus SAN.

If you plan for eva there are lot of solutions available on hp for cloning a storage.

HP StorageWorks Continuous Access EVA is a controller-based application that performs real-time replication between HP StorageWorks enterprise virtual arrays. The solution is enhanced to perform remote replication, and deliver high data availability and performance to users on Fibre Channel based campus, metro or continental Storage Area Networks (SANs). HP Continuous Access EVA provides customers with the highest level of storage data protection capabilities to meet their business continuity implementation goals. They can achieve a competitive advantage by combining disaster-tolerant solutions and disaster-tolerant managed services into their planning and daily routines, ensuring the data's security, availability and integrity - no matter what.
HP Continuous Access EVA delivers local copy with HP StorageWorks Business Copy EVA and virtualization interoperability to protect against disaster scenarios, saving time and money while maintaining the flow of information across the enterprise. HP Continuous Access EVA is an irreplaceable component for protecting any business, yours especially.

see http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/conaccesseva/index.html

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/bizcopyeva/index.html

Also you shoud have a DR location, which can be atleast 1000km away from ur Primary site.CA EVA will help you replicating the data at ur DR site also.

regards,
Syam

[Uwe Zessin]

Virtual Tape, like FalconStor's VTL (virtual tape library) would have the same problem, because it just emulates a tape drive on the SAN - it still runs the same protocols.