[ILUG] Cheap tape drives

[Baldwin_James at emc.com]

Conor, what your uncle needs is the following.....dont ever undersell, not
even to a relative ;)
http://www.quantumatl.com/Products/p7000.cfm
16 Fibre-attached LTO DLT Drives...679 slots......1.7 TB/HR...that should
cover it

Being honest though....on-line data replication via disk mirroring is only a
viable option if
1)  You already have a tape backup solution in place
2)  In order to be able to restore a point-in-time / last-known-good-backup,
you need to create tape rotations..you cant do this with online disk(unless
you sync/split volumes in a round-robin configuration..which requires large
quantities of disk)
3)  Restore-time is critical to operations uptime.
4)  Incase of site disaster/powerdown, you have a hotsite with a SAN over
WAN(low-lightlevel fibre links) facility like EMC SRDF[Symmetrix Remote Data
Facility] ready to come up to provide business continuance.

Back to the point.....
For a small-company backup solution, I'd opt for possibly a DLT7000 drive.
DLT7000 drives are becoming much cheaper nowadays because of the
introduction of Super-DLT DLT8000 and LTO drives.  They are very
reliable(relative to other drive types) and have a high tape reuse count
(most solution providers say max. 50 leader-to-trail uses but in practice
can be used much more). DLT drives have more better sense-code(SCSI)
reporting that other drives and will most of the time catch a problem (or
make you aware of it)before it mangles a tape or destroys its heads...
J.



-----Original Message-----
From: Wynne, Conor [mailto:Conor.Wynne at COMPAQ.COM]
Because you've got both! 

You got RAID sets with online spares, and then you got you three backups ->
verified with restore jobs and kept in cold storage offsite, along with
hardcopies of everything too. 
[This is for <SMALL> company]