LTO Questions and setup advices

[Michael Kammes]

A few things you may want to look into:

Cache-A. Network based backup appliance…it’s an LTO5 drive which sits on the network, and has a webserver built in where can mount the device in a myriad of ways. This is a hugely popular soultion onset AND inpost since it is portable and dead easy to use.

Uber tech demo I did a year or so ago (when the unit was still LTO4) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbZzH2cnR7c&hd=1

DNA Evolution: A product by Storage DNA. Uses the new IBM LTFS – that is, having an OS use an LTO5 tape like a removable hard drive. This automated system backs up to tape, while retaining a catalog of all of the media, and offers WAN and LAN acceleration for backups and retrievals, plus delta synchronization. Mac only, currently. https://storagedna.com/

What both of these options do is keep the data native. No TAR files, no proprietary wrappers.

In the interest of full disclosure, the company I work for sells a large amount of both of these products. However, I would not endorse it if I didn’t think they worked well.

LTO5 is the current incarnation of LTO, and can hold almost double (uncompressed) than an LTO4 tape. LTO5 tapes are about $90 bucks now, and prices have been dropping. I’d go with LTO5, since it’s backwards compatible.

I am a fan of the Atto SAS Card, and the HP or IBM drives. I base my choice on what the software supports – both drives work pretty well. I also prefer External for ease of use and transportability, and the price point isn’t so great that it makes the extra cost a deal killer.

Hope this helps.

~Michael

.: michael kammes mpse
.: senior applications editor . post workflow consultant
.: audio specialist . act fcp . acsr
.: michaelkammes.com

Hear me pontificate: Speaking Schedule .

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[Nathaniel Cooper]

Tolis BRU PE is a solid product. Good choice.

Assuming you are wanting to use the Mac Pro tower you made reference to, there is no internal LTO option. There are no LTO drives that will physically fit in Mac towers, unless you are comfortable using a hack saw and don’t mind voided warranties…

I’ve never used/supported any of the SAS cards in your link, but Areca is a good company as far as affordable companies that support Mac go. They make a lot of RAID controllers that I’ve seen work well at a very reasonable price. Based on that, it seems like a good choice.

In regards to Michael’s Cache-A recommendation. If you can spend the extra their entry solution, the Prime Cache-A, is a fantastic unit and light years beyone what your talking about, however the starting price is $7k USD. Based upon your previous post I assume you want to stay in the 2000 to 3000 Euro range, in which case your going down the right path, just find an external LTO.

Nate Cooper
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office: 949.861.2725
cell: 949.375.2738

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[Bob Zelin]

Again, Cache-A is fantastic. You must understand that a local bare LTO drive will bog down your server if it is direct connect (meaning that you backup at night when no one else is working). With an appliance, like the Cache-A, you can backup anytime, and ANYONE can get access to it, and do their backup, across the network. This is why you spend all that money for the box. No fear of using processor (or SAS card) resources – you are tying in an ethernet device to your network. The Cache-A appears to your system as a NAS.

Bob Zelin

[Michael Kammes]

Bill, it appears you’re in Germany.

I’d say contact NMAV.de – ask for Johanis Bouer (sp?) They are the German Cache-A reseller. They may even have demo units that they would be willing to sell at a discounted price. If you were here in L.A., I’d have plenty of units for you to check out…

~Michael

.: michael kammes mpse
.: senior applications editor . post workflow consultant
.: audio specialist . act fcp . acsr
.: michaelkammes.com

Hear me pontificate: Speaking Schedule .

[Bill Nelson]

Michael, Nate, Bob,

thank you for your input!

Michael – thanks for posting the video. Very informative and in fact – the Cache A seems to be a well planned product aiming at special post-production needs.

But for my needs it seems to have a lot features I won’t need. I understand the downside of using standard LTO procedure based on .tar compression but it’s not really a big deal for my workflow. We’re a small post facility with 2-3 operators and I’m in control of the projects and the structure. So what I’m going to do is backing up finished projects over night…this archived projects are really a long-term backup. I normally won’t need them anymore…they will be stored in a safe at a different place. So I’m not depending on fast archiving and re-archiving.

Even though it is a great feature to use the Cache-A like a NAS device, it’s really not a feature for me, because I really don’t want just ANYONE to use the backup archives. I’m kind of a organization-nerd and I’m checking the whole structure of our projects before backing them up. So it’s really ME that finally wants to press the “archive!-button! 😉

Anyway…do you see any more pitfalls that might occur with my intended setup? I’m trying hard to find facts about compatibility but this whole LTO-thing does really seem to be a very special matter…it’s hard to find useful information out there.

And Michael, you’re right…I’m from germany…so please excuse my bad english.

Guys…thank you again!

Bill

[Fred Jodry]

Bill, if it has to be YOU who presses the backup button, don`t kill the other options, but buy the external version and lock the cables in your work closet.

[Marcus Lyall]

Very happy with Archiware Presstore right now.
And they are a german company.
Got my lto4 running from a g5 connected to the network.
Working like a charm…

But get someone to set it all up for you.

[Bob Cole]

I noticed that the Cache-A has a hard drive built-in. I assume the workflow involves copying from your media RAID to that drive?

If so, please let me share my paranoia with you. Currently I use an HP8200 Windows computer with a SCSI-attached HP Ultrium 920 LTO-3 drive. My workflow involves moving media files from the CalDigit HDOne (attached to my MacPro) over my gigabit Ethernet network to the HP8200’s hard drive, and then over to the LTO-3 tape.

The big flaw (and source of my paranoia) in this workflow is the transfer from Mac to HP hard drive. There is no verification at this stage (although there is verification on the actual transfer to LTO-3 tape).

How would the Cache-A’s workflow differ? If data goes to the Cache-A’s hard drive, is it verified during that transfer, unlike my workflow?

Thanks!

Bob C

[Eric Hansen]

hey bill

i am also a BRU PE user. I have a HP LTO-4 drive connected via SAS to a ATTO R380 card that is also serving an SAS RAID, used for an ethernet SAN. make sure you keep tape devices on a different channel than hard drives (random access and linear access cannot be on the same channel).

let me tell you of a few of the negatives i’ve encountered:

– i’m currently using an old unsupported version of BRU PE. i tried to upgrade to newer versions, but i would get really weird glitches in the interface and some functions didn’t even work. it really threw the Tolis support people for a loop. since i had to do these “experiments” on the same Mac Pro that acts as our 56TB server, i could only mess with this when the office was closed. since our facility is sometimes running 24/7, this meant days or weeks with no LTO backup going. it was really frustrating and i’ve stuck with an older version of the software because i’ve figured out its glitches and have learned to live with them. Tolis keeps telling me to upgrade to get new features and stuff, but i just don’t have the time to mess around anymore. as far as i know, my experience with this is unique. Tolis could not reproduce it and they didn’t know of anyone else with these problems.

– i bought another SAS card and put it in a computer on our ethernet network, thinking i could backup parts of our SAN from there, and stop needing to be on the server. nope. BRU PE only works with direct attached volumes, similar to Pro Tools. it could only backup our SAN if it was running on the same computer that the SAN RAIDs were attached to. the only solution here was to copy everything over to internal drives on the client computer, and then move them to tape. 800GB over even GigE takes too long. i told Tolis about this and they said they might add network support in the future. at the time, i was the only one who requested it, so who knows how high this feature request is on their list.

– BRU PE doesn’t create a searchable database for your tapes. so i also create separate databases that i can search to find media, projects, etc, which then tell me what tape my media is on. you can’t rely on BRU PE for this.

– using a proprietary format doesn’t bother me that much, especially since every version of BRU is backwards compatible all the way to the beginning of their business. the engineers have told me that there’s a bit of redundancy built into the filesystem. so if a tape physically breaks, you don’t lose your data at the point of the tape breakage. as a result, their LTO-4 tape capacity is more like 700GB instead of 800GB. i like this. you can also download and run any BRU product in read-only mode for free. so your tapes are always recoverable if you have the correct drive.

– i avoid spreading info across tapes. i make sure my archives fit on one tape and i group them that way. this keeps my databases accurate. i was thinking about getting an autoloader when we were really slammed and needed to be running backups constantly. but i didn’t like that i could write an 8TB archive, but not really know what files were where. i would just know that tapes 120-129 had my file somewhere. this is the only way to run an autoloader with BRU PE and i didn’t like that. we run 2 single tape drives in doubler mode (writing an in-house tape and out-of-house archive tape at the same time).

these are just some of my experiences. your milage my vary. but in the end, i’m happy with LTO-based backup. i’ve lost too many hard drives to not use tape. our office has written over 250 LTO-4 tapes in the last year, and we’re writing new tapes everyday. i’ve used the original SDLT 600a, so i know what the Cache-A box is like. it’s great. the price is a bit much to swallow, but it’s dead simple that’s for sure. the advantage i had with the 600a is that everyone in my office understood how to use it. they could write tapes and recover files very easily. with BRU PE, there’s only a few people that know how to use it, and they don’t understand it that well.

e

Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Daniel Perez]

Eric … you say you connected your LTO unit to a RAID controller: R380. I would like to do the same using a R680 but don’t know how to properly configure it. I didn’t even know it was possible! .. I have been using two cards: one RAID controller R680 and one H380 for the LTO !!

Daniel Perez
Madrid – Spain
danibam@hotail.com