Backup Central

We are in the process of upgrading our backup hardware and examining our options. I was wondering does anyone have an opinion they wouldn't mind sharing about Qualstar LTO tape libraries? Thanks.

Dave Werth
Garmin AT, Inc.
Salem, Oregon

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Hi Dave,

What would you like to know? I have been using a XLS-832700 for
a few years and have been very happy with it. I just purchased
two RLS-8444D jukeboxes, and started setting them up a few weeks
ago.

--Mel

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On Fri, 8 Oct 2010, Werth, Dave wrote:

We are in the process of upgrading our backup hardware and examining our options. I was wondering does anyone have an opinion they wouldn't mind sharing about Qualstar LTO tape libraries? Thanks.

Dave Werth
Garmin AT, Inc.
Salem, Oregon

________________________________
This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential material for the sole use of the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, please be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of this e-mail or any attachment is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please contact the sender and delete all copies.

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Hey, absolutely.

I love the Qualstar LTO tape library we have. It's an XLS 832700. We have the one LRM and two
MEM1's. When we first got it in 2007, we didn't know whether to trust the library or NetWorker
about whether a tape was really in the drive, so we took the cartridge slots off the doors so
we could see into the LRM and visually check (without opening the door) what the drive status
was. That has been helpful, but the XLS has never lied to me about the status of a tape drive
(while NetWorker is periodically confused). Anyway, we have capacity for 2,505 cartridges.

The tape library is rock solid, and after much work with EMC, NetWorker solidly supports the
library now.

Frank

On 10/8/10 2:39 PM, Werth, Dave wrote:
We are in the process of upgrading our backup hardware and examining our options. I was wondering does anyone have an opinion they wouldn't mind sharing about Qualstar LTO tape libraries? Thanks.

Dave Werth
Garmin AT, Inc.
Salem, Oregon



--
Frank Swasey | http://www.uvm.edu/~fcs
Sr Systems Administrator | Always remember: You are UNIQUE,
University of Vermont | just like everyone else.
"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


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On Oct 8, 2010, at 3:06 PM, Francis Swasey wrote:

Hey, absolutely.

I love the Qualstar LTO tape library we have. It's an XLS 832700. We have the one LRM and two
MEM1's. When we first got it in 2007, we didn't know whether to trust the library or NetWorker
about whether a tape was really in the drive, so we took the cartridge slots off the doors so
we could see into the LRM and visually check (without opening the door) what the drive status
was. That has been helpful, but the XLS has never lied to me about the status of a tape drive
(while NetWorker is periodically confused). Anyway, we have capacity for 2,505 cartridges.

The tape library is rock solid, and after much work with EMC, NetWorker solidly supports the
library now.

Same here. For the price Qualstar gets for its tape libraries, they are hard to beat. I have a Qualstar 88132 model with 4 LTO-3 tape drives. It is a real workhorse. We back up roughly 250 clients to it nightly with the four drives connected to a Dell 2950 server running Red Hat Linux AS 4 and NetWorker 7.5.3. Those four tape drives routinely see 80-90MB/sec throughput, which is pretty good considering we only have two network drops on that server and no disk-to-disk-to-tape involved.


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Melvin, Frank, & Stan,

Thanks for your input. I didn't really have specific questions but I just didn't know much about Qualstar so I wanted to see if anyone had any substantial complaints about them. From what I've heard from you they make good products for a good price. That's what I wanted to know.

BTW, the one we're looking at is the 8433 with 3 LTO-4 drives and 33 slots (expandable to 66).

Thanks, Dave

Dave Werth
Garmin AT, Inc.
Salem, Oregon

-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER < at > LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU] On Behalf Of Werth, Dave
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2010 11:40 AM
To: NETWORKER < at > LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU
Subject: [Networker] Qualstar

We are in the process of upgrading our backup hardware and examining our options. I was wondering does anyone have an opinion they wouldn't mind sharing about Qualstar LTO tape libraries? Thanks.

Dave Werth
Garmin AT, Inc.
Salem, Oregon

________________________________
This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential material for the sole use of the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, please be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of this e-mail or any attachment is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please contact the sender and delete all copies.

Thank you for your cooperation.


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STANLEY R. HORWITZ wrote:
On Oct 8, 2010, at 3:06 PM, Francis Swasey wrote:

Hey, absolutely.

I love the Qualstar LTO tape library we have. It's an XLS 832700. We have the one LRM and two
MEM1's. When we first got it in 2007, we didn't know whether to trust the library or NetWorker
about whether a tape was really in the drive, so we took the cartridge slots off the doors so
we could see into the LRM and visually check (without opening the door) what the drive status
was. That has been helpful, but the XLS has never lied to me about the status of a tape drive
(while NetWorker is periodically confused). Anyway, we have capacity for 2,505 cartridges.

The tape library is rock solid, and after much work with EMC, NetWorker solidly supports the
library now.

Same here. For the price Qualstar gets for its tape libraries, they are hard to beat. I have a Qualstar 88132 model with 4 LTO-3 tape drives. It is a real workhorse. We back up roughly 250 clients to it nightly with the four drives connected to a Dell 2950 server running Red Hat Linux AS 4 and NetWorker 7.5.3. Those four tape drives routinely see 80-90MB/sec throughput, which is pretty good considering we only have two network drops on that server and no disk-to-disk-to-tape involved.

Stan, where you say "for the price", do you mean that the prices are
reasonable, or minimally competitive, for what you're getting, or the
price is on the higher end but well worth the extra?

Also, what all (say, in a nutshell) was involved in getting it to work
with NW? I thought NW had long supported Qualstar, but maybe your's was
a newer model they'd not yet tested? Just curious.



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--
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Voice: (301) 713-3284 x210
- The preceding message is personal and does not reflect any official or
unofficial position of the United States Department of Commerce -
- Any opinions expressed in this message are NOT those of the US Govt. -


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George,

Based on the price in the quote I have it looks like they may be a better than average value for the money. But I don't have any actual experience with them yet so YMMV.

Dave

Dave Werth
Garmin AT, Inc.
Salem, Oregon

-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER < at > LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU] On Behalf Of George Sinclair
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2010 1:49 PM
To: NETWORKER < at > LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Qualstar

STANLEY R. HORWITZ wrote:
On Oct 8, 2010, at 3:06 PM, Francis Swasey wrote:

Hey, absolutely.

I love the Qualstar LTO tape library we have. It's an XLS 832700. We have the one LRM and two
MEM1's. When we first got it in 2007, we didn't know whether to trust the library or NetWorker
about whether a tape was really in the drive, so we took the cartridge slots off the doors so
we could see into the LRM and visually check (without opening the door) what the drive status
was. That has been helpful, but the XLS has never lied to me about the status of a tape drive
(while NetWorker is periodically confused). Anyway, we have capacity for 2,505 cartridges.

The tape library is rock solid, and after much work with EMC, NetWorker solidly supports the
library now.

Same here. For the price Qualstar gets for its tape libraries, they are hard to beat. I have a Qualstar 88132 model with 4 LTO-3 tape drives. It is a real workhorse. We back up roughly 250 clients to it nightly with the four drives connected to a Dell 2950 server running Red Hat Linux AS 4 and NetWorker 7.5.3. Those four tape drives routinely see 80-90MB/sec throughput, which is pretty good considering we only have two network drops on that server and no disk-to-disk-to-tape involved.

Stan, where you say "for the price", do you mean that the prices are
reasonable, or minimally competitive, for what you're getting, or the
price is on the higher end but well worth the extra?

Also, what all (say, in a nutshell) was involved in getting it to work
with NW? I thought NW had long supported Qualstar, but maybe your's was
a newer model they'd not yet tested? Just curious.



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--
George Sinclair
Voice: (301) 713-3284 x210
- The preceding message is personal and does not reflect any official or
unofficial position of the United States Department of Commerce -
- Any opinions expressed in this message are NOT those of the US Govt. -


via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER


This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential material for the sole use of the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, please be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of this e-mail or any attachment is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please contact the sender and delete all copies.

Thank you for your cooperation.


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On Oct 8, 2010, at 5:03 PM, Werth, Dave wrote:

Stan, where you say "for the price", do you mean that the prices are
reasonable, or minimally competitive, for what you're getting, or the
price is on the higher end but well worth the extra?

Also, what all (say, in a nutshell) was involved in getting it to work
with NW? I thought NW had long supported Qualstar, but maybe your's was
a newer model they'd not yet tested? Just curious.

Compared with similar tape libraries with the same type of tape drives from other companies such as Sun, IBM, and Spectralogic, the cost to purchase our Qualstar unit and annual maintenance was very competitive. The Qualstar tape library I have now is two years old so I don't remember the details, but as I recall, competing tape libraries and their annual maintenance were more money compared with our Qualstar.

As far as setting it up and working, I suppose it depends on your environment and the experience you bring to the project. I have each of the four tape drives' fiber channel line plugged into one of three dual channel HBA cards in a Dell 2950. The robotic line goes to a small SAN switch which has nothing else on it other then a line that goes to one of the HBA cards on our Del 2950. At the time I set this up I was a total novice with Linux system management so it took me a week or two to figure out how to get it all to work, not to mention that I somehow burned through two motherboards on our Dell 2950 before we got one that worked. I found that the tech support from Qualstar and Dell was first rate in helping me figure out how to get it to work. I did have to engage tech support from both companies quite a bit, but most likely that was because I was green behind the ears with this stuff. Someone with more experience would have been able to get it to work much more quickly. !
My biggest gripe with the Qualstar is that its documentation is confusing. The issues I had did not involve NetWorker at all, but purely on the Linux side figuring out how to get the Dell server to see the tape drives and robot.

One thing that just occurred to me ... our Qualstar reads tape labels upside down or right side up. It seems as if different tape media vendors affix LTO-3 tape labels upside down and some do it right side up. I never gave it a second thought because I thought all LTO-3 tape libraries would be fine with that until I got to SunGard and their IBM tape library that we lease from them for DR purposes wasn't as flexible. The SunGard tech support engineer had to spend a good deal of time figuring out how to get their tape library to read our tape labels, which honed into the time I had allotted to me for my DR exercise. So keep that in mind if you also use SunGard for DR services.


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STANLEY R. HORWITZ wrote:
On Oct 8, 2010, at 5:03 PM, Werth, Dave wrote:

Stan, where you say "for the price", do you mean that the prices are
reasonable, or minimally competitive, for what you're getting, or the
price is on the higher end but well worth the extra?

Also, what all (say, in a nutshell) was involved in getting it to work
with NW? I thought NW had long supported Qualstar, but maybe your's was
a newer model they'd not yet tested? Just curious.

Compared with similar tape libraries with the same type of tape drives from other companies such as Sun, IBM, and Spectralogic, the cost to purchase our Qualstar unit and annual maintenance was very competitive. The Qualstar tape library I have now is two years old so I don't remember the details, but as I recall, competing tape libraries and their annual maintenance were more money compared with our Qualstar.

As far as setting it up and working, I suppose it depends on your environment and the experience you bring to the project. I have each of the four tape drives' fiber channel line plugged into one of three dual channel HBA cards in a Dell 2950. The robotic line goes to a small SAN switch which has nothing else on it other then a line that goes to one of the HBA cards on our Del 2950. At the time I set this up I was a total novice with Linux system management so it took me a week or two to figure out how to get it all to work, not to mention that I somehow burned through two motherboards on our Dell 2950 before we got one that worked. I found that the tech support from Qualstar and Dell was first rate in helping me figure out how to get it to work. I did have to engage tech support from both companies quite a bit, but most likely that was because I was green behind the ears with this stuff. Someone with more experience would have been able to get it to work much more quickly.
!
My biggest gripe with the Qualstar is that its documentation is confusing. The issues I had did not involve NetWorker at all, but purely on the Linux side figuring out how to get the Dell server to see the tape drives and robot.

One thing that just occurred to me ... our Qualstar reads tape labels upside down or right side up. It seems as if different tape media vendors affix LTO-3 tape labels upside down and some do it right side up. I never gave it a second thought because I thought all LTO-3 tape libraries would be fine with that until I got to SunGard and their IBM tape library that we lease from them for DR purposes wasn't as flexible. The SunGard tech support engineer had to spend a good deal of time figuring out how to get their tape library to read our tape labels, which honed into the time I had allotted to me for my DR exercise. So keep that in mind if you also use SunGard for DR services.

I've experimented with that before on both a Storagetek L80 and a Dell
ML6000 tape library, and they worked fine with upside down labels, but I
never did extensive testing, like keeping them in there for days at a
time. Who knows, maybe those libraries were only happy because it didn't
linger that way?

I create my own bar codes, so I'm in control of how they're applied, and
I always put them on right side up.

Interesting point, either way.



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unofficial position of the United States Department of Commerce -
- Any opinions expressed in this message are NOT those of the US Govt. -


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The XLS is a new design with the I/O slots that open on the front (holding a 10 tape
cartridge). When the I/O Slots are opened and the cartridge holder removed, you can stick your
arm inside the library. Therefore, Qualstar designed the library to lock the robot arm when
the I/O slots are opened. It took a year of providing examples of tapes getting "stuck" before
EMC finally provided a fix for the problem.

In a nutshell -- the XLS went "offline" when the I/O ports opened. NetWorker didn't notice.
NW would eject a tape and then discover the robot wouldn't move and fail the unload operation.
The problem was NW didn't recognize an already ejected tape -- and would fail all future
unload attempts because the tape drive would return an error code that told NW the tape it was
trying to eject was already ejected -- which NW would report as "drive not ready, needs init".
This was September 2007 to August 2008.

On 10/8/10 4:48 PM, George Sinclair wrote:
Also, what all (say, in a nutshell) was involved in getting it to work with NW? I thought NW
had long supported Qualstar, but maybe your's was a newer model they'd not yet tested? Just
curious.

--
Frank Swasey | http://www.uvm.edu/~fcs
Sr Systems Administrator | Always remember: You are UNIQUE,
University of Vermont | just like everyone else.
"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


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I know this thread is quite old, but I'm curious as to Melvin's experience with the RLS-8444s that have been in place now for about 10 months. Have you had any issues with them? Would you buy them again given almost a year of using them?