amanda and LTO3 or LTO4 tapes
On 11/30/10 1:45 AM, Uwe Beger wrote:
Hello,
does anybody has good experience with the use of LTO3 or even LTO4 tape devices (no changers) with amanda. I'm looking specially for Tandberg models with SAS interface. Do you have recommendations for a specific controller? I read that some cheaper Adaptec (1045, 1405 IIRC) are not compatible with LTO4! Is this correct? I prefer a Novell SuSE based backup system. Any pitfalls known for such a combination?
Thank you already in advance for your comments.
I haven't seen any responses to this yet.
I should note that this is not an Amanda specific question, rather it is an OS/hardware question. If
you can install the drivers and access the tape drive using mt and tar, then Amanda will work with
it. These tape drives have been around for quite a while now, so you ought to be able to find what
you need to set it up on your particular distribution of Linux.
I don't use LTO, but I know people who have had great luck with it. You can find tapetype
definitions for your amanda.conf here
http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Tapetype_definitions, or you
can make your own by running amtapetype --
http://wiki.zmanda.com/man/amtapetype.8.html. That's also
a reasonable way of running your drive through its paces and checking the performance of your
system. It will take quite a while to run.
Note that LTO, especially 4, has high throughput, and you need to have your backup server tuned to
be able to maintain that throughput. Typically, that means a decent machine with the tape drive and
other drives on separate buses and using a substantial sized holding disk so that your tape writes
are coming from a local disk drive and not from the network to the tape drive. When you plan your
system, look at all the data paths and balance things so that you don't have any particular
bottleneck that is constraining everything else.
If you google "lto4 suse", you'll find things like
http://www.novell.com/partnerguide/product/208146.html, which is the HP Storage Works LTO4,
indicating that they have worked with Novell to gain certification with their Enterprise OSes. Lots
of other interesting links show up as well. This one
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/storage/f/1216/t/19119934.aspx shows some of the hangups
you can run into if your disk drive systems can't keep up with the tape drive.
--
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Chris Hoogendyk
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O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology& Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<hoogendyk < at > bio.umass.edu>
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Erdös 4
