[Beowulf] Re: OT: LTO Ultrium (3) throughput?

Jon Aquilina eagles051387 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 6 22:42:15 PDT 2008


in my case where money isnt an issue wouldnt it be better for me to build a
raid backup array? i understand your reasoning. im still studying and fairly
new in the higher education of IT so when i start working ill keep what you
mentioned to heart. only problem is that where i am located in europe things
are more expensive here. another random idea why not create a raided backup
array backed up to tape? is it possible to do a tape back up of data thata
being written to disk instantly

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 5:05 AM, Steve Cousins <cousins at umit.maine.edu>
wrote:

>
>> From: "Jon Aquilina"
>> this is slightly off topic but im just wondering why spend thousands of
>> dollars when u can just setup another server and backup everything to a
>> raided hard drive array?
>>
>
> Another RAID system helps but only if it is located somewhere else. The
> main reason we backup is for disaster recovery. One nice thing about tape is
> that you can take the tapes to another location easily or put them in a fire
> safe.
>
> Another reason is that RAID systems don't scale up as easily as a tape
> system. Our library has two 15 tape magazines that can be removed and
> replaced. It costs about $750 to buy 15 new tapes plus a magazine. That's
> not too bad for 6 TB of storage (uncompressed, with HW compression we get
> about 9 TB). Plus it takes practically no time to start using it.
>
> The library wasn't really that expensive when we bought it either.
> Somewhere around $7500. At the time we bought that we were using 400 GB
> drives in our RAID systems at $300 each. To build a server with 5 TiB
> (usable) of RAID storage at the time was about $7000. The tapes were more
> expensive then (about $100 each) but for about $10,500 we got 12 TB of tape
> storage (library plus 30 tapes). To get roughly the same of disk storage
> would have been about $14K. So right off the bat tape was cheaper. Plus it
> is so much easier to manage. I like the idea of snapshots and using rsync
> plus links is a crafty idea but I sleep better knowing that I have a "real"
> (one that I can carry around) backup of our data in our safe.
>
> Steve
>



-- 
Jonathan Aquilina
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