[NTLUG:Discuss] Tape Suggestions

[Chris Cox]

MadHat Unspecific wrote:
> I have a couple of machines I want to rebuild.  They are running that 
> other OS and it is pissing me off.  I want to rebuild the file server, 
> and I am looking at GFS (if anyone has any experience, I would love to 
> hear it), but I need a recommendation on a tape library controller. 
> This is all Dell hardware and the tape drive is Dell 124T.  Any help 
> would be greatly appreciated.

mtx controls most robotic units

At work we use LTO3 tape drives inside of large robotic
devices (IBM ones for large scale mainframe deployments).
With that said, the robotic units work the same big or small.

Are you planning on clustering file servers?  Then GFS is probably
a good choice.  Otherwise, you are pretty open to choosing
whichever filesystem you want.

My file serving areas are reiserfs filesystems.... but that's
my choice because of its ease of "growability" (new word).

We do disk to disk (since we handle terabytes of data)
backup and then the disk backup is taken to tape (LTO3 via
the IBM tape library unit).  We use tar.

Disk to disk is done via rsync (ultimately) wrappered inside
of scripts to handle snapshots, etc.