[NTLUG:Discuss] Tape Suggestions

[MadHat Unspecific]

Chris Cox wrote:
> 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.

We have a simple situation.  Multiple web servers, one file server used 
for backup as well.  Right now we do rsync from the file server to the 
web servers, as one requirement is if the file server fails, the 
websites don't.  GFS (global file system) looked like an option, but I 
am still researching.  The people who set it us used windows and 
Microsoft NFS server and I am less than pleased with this solution.  Not 
to mention that BackUp Exec has been giving me headaches for simple 
backups from a local disk...

Really, I am in the research phase, and was looking for personal 
experience.  All of the servers are in a dell blade server and I am 
steadily upgrading to RHEL 5 (because that is what they wanted for 
support issues and that we bought the licenses from Dell as well).

Anyway, probably more info than is necessary, but...

Thanks again