[Sunhelp] High Capacity Tape Drives

[Bjrn Ramqvist]

Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> 
> > It must be new, but apparantly it's for real. Check out question 2 on
> > Compaq's FAQ at
> > http://www.compaq.com/products/storageworks/tape-and-optical-s
> torage/ait50gb-qanda.html
> 
> If you are lucky enough to get 2:1 compression, it'll even do 100GB.
> 
> Compaq gives credit to Sony for inventing AIT, but I haven't seen a 50/100
> GB drive from Sony or anyone else.
> 
> LIB!  (as in, Well, I'll be...)  I'll have to call the Sony Rep and see why
> I'm not in on that one.  However, the data rates that they're quoting for
> that drive are not faster than the AIT that I have at work, and the capacity
> is 15GB more.  It already takes way too long to do our 30GB backup now, I'd
> hate to try to get 50 on there overnight...

You'd have to span across multiple drives. They even manage to run
"RAIT" (like RAID, but tapes) nowadays, mostly for paritychecking, but
to spin up the transferrates.
Seriously, if you're getting a problem with backuptimes, consider
copying your "hot data" over to a "cool place" (a secondary temporary
storage space), to allow spanning bigger backupwindows..

I know I'm facing that problem now on our BaaN-system... *shiver*

	/Regards, Bjorn