LTO tape drives ??

[Joel Shank]

This is a continuation of a post I made a few days ago concerning SDLT tape drives (which I can NOT get to work properly).

I am now considering swapping them out for LTO drives - BUT - I don't want to do that if they also won't work!

Does anyone use LTO drives on HPUX?
Are they SCSI-attached?
Do they work properly with fbackup/frecover and tar?
Are there any issues I should know about when using LTO drives (special patches required, drivers, etc)?
I figure someone out on this forum must be using LTO drives?

Thanks for your help...
Joel

[harry d brown jr · Accepted solution]

We have a few hanging off HP servers, which I think is 6, and we'll probably boost that amount to 12 before the end of Q1-2003.

I haven't heard of any issues, but I will double check this afternoon.

live free or die
harry

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
Yes we use LTO drives on HP-UX. LVD SCSI is used. LTO drives on HP-UX uses the common stape driver. I have not heard about any critical patch for LTO drives but it could be a good idea to install the latest SCSI patches (I have PHKL_25896 installed but there is perhaps later SCSI patches).

I have not tested LTO drives with all backup utilitys (we mainly use LTO together with OmniBack) but I have never had any problem with them.

[Chris Vail]

Quite frankly, HP doesn't offer a tape library/tape drive combination thats big enough or fast enough for our needs. We're doing about 8TB of backups every day now, and we need 6 months in near-line storage. Do the math and thats about 40 tapes/day, or a 7200 tape library, if storing 200GB/tape.

We're looking at a StorageTek PowderHorn 9310,
with (20) 9940b tape drives, all fiber-attached SCSI. We're currently using a StoragTek L700 with (12) 9940a drives. These are copper SCSI, with Crossroads 8000 fiber/copper muxes to connect them back to the HP L class machine that is our master backup sever. The Crossroads are REAL CRAP--don't buy them. But we're very happy with the 9940a tapes AND the L700 robot itself. Whatever you decide, use FIBER instead of copper SCSI. At the data rates these guys run at, there are too many errors on copper circuits.

[Pete Randall]

I've got a sneaking suspicion that Chris doesn't use fbackup - not with that volume.

Chris?


Pete

[Jeffrey Li]

The links about IBM LTO Tape Devices and the driver running on HP-UX:

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/tape/pubs/prodpubs.html


ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/storage/devdrvr/Doc/IBM_ultrium_tape_IUG.pdf

[Angus Crome]

We are using an IBM L32 library with 10 IBM Fibre attached (Brocade switched) LTO drives. The library is setup as two virtual ones and shared between Omniback 4.10 and some version of Veritas for Microsoft Exchange. On the HP-UX and Solaris side of backups, we are getting anywhere from 250 - 580 Gb per tape (depending on the data. Our transfer rates are upwards of 100 Gb/hr, per drive, for systems that can support that much disk throughput. We are extremely happy with how it is working. We shrank our backup windows by at least and order of magnitude going from 10 DIRECT attached SCSI DLT to 6 Fibre-switched LTO for UNIX). The exchange numbers aren't as good, because it consists of obscene numbers of very small files.

I also connected up an HP Ultra-SCSI LTO drive to verify interoperability in Omniback. The throughput performance was about 4% better than through our SAN (I ran the same data on the same quiesced server 4 times for both devices and saw very similar results each time).

The short of it, if you have to go to a large scale library, it is highly probable that you should be moving to some shared interconnect system such as Fibre-switched or IP-Scsi. This will give you the most bang for your buck, with a minimal number of problems (IP-SCSI is probably the wave of the future, but I personally don't think it is ready for prime-time yet). Direct attached SCSI and SCSI-muxes are not flexible/reliable enough for the data sizes you are describing.

As for SDLT, DLT has become rather robust over the past two years. It has generally been my experience that the problem is either firmware or hardware (in that order). If your current vendor cannot get you working hardware. You should return it and try someone else. HP, STK and IBM have generally been very good to us. There are others out there with very good products (ADIC, SpectraLogix, etc), but I have no direct experience with them on larger scale devices.

Last, but not least, both STK and ADIC (as well as a few others) make really large libraries for near-line storage purposes. I believe they both support LTO drives at this time, which are generally cheaper than the drives you are using. You might want to check into that as well.

[Norm Hutton]

I need to buy some used LTO and SDLT tapes. Do you know where I might find some?
Thanks,
Norm

[Patrick Wallek]

You are wanting used TAPES? Not used TAPE DRIVES?? There is no way I would use used tapes for anything. You just don't know what the tapes have been through and whether or not they are still good.

Yes new tapes are expensive, but worth it. Bite the bullet and buy new tapes. I just would not gamble on someone else's used tapes.