[geeks] Sun Ultra2 and DLT tape drives

[velociraptor]

On 9/9/06, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> Anyone here ever run a DLT drive on a Sun Ultra2?
>
> I've not had a lot of luck with DVD backup, and DLT tape drives aren't
> too expensive now on eBay, so I am at least thinking about getting one.
> Still have some DVD experiments to try first, but it isn't looking
> good.
>
> If I get a DLT drive right now, the most likely host for it would be a
> Sun Ultra 2/300 dual CPU system.  I never ran fast tape drives on any of
> the Ultras so I don't know how well they run.

The big thing with any linear tape is going to be the streaming data
rate to the drive--without that, you will shoeshine the tape to hell,
wearing out both the tape and the drive head faster.

So, at a minimum,  you are going to want to have the tape drive on
it's own SCSI bus.  You   will also need to experiment with the
multiple streams from your hosts--backing up one host at a time
generally will not provide enough data to the system to stream the
tape properly.  I don't see why it shouldn't be able to handle it,
though you may want to review the performance of the various network
interfaces available for Ultra 2's as well, since that could also be a
bottleneck.

Phil S. can probably speak more to an OSS backup software, like
Bacula's, capabilities in this regard.  I know that with Netbackup,
it's something you have to tune by monitoring and analysis--figuring
out the number of concurrent backups and the number of concurrent
streams (Netbackup does both) is not something the software is capable
of managing itself.

I know that at least some of the backups being done as of 12 months
ago at some rather large hosting facilities in the DC area were
running on E250s and E450s with both network attached robots and
locally attached robots (I had an interview with said company).  I
suppose the locally attached may have been on FC connections, but
given what was said about the environment, I doubt it.  For a small
network, an Ultra 2 seems like the perfect workhorse to be honest.

=Nadine=