LTO Questions and setup advices

[Eric Hansen]

hey Daniel

it is possible, but as i stated, i stopped doing it because i didn’t want to deal with BRU’s glitches on our main SAN server. BRU has added network support, so now i can use a regular Mac Pro as the LTO station, backing up files on our ethernet SAN. the source volume no longer has to be direct attached.

you don’t have to do anything to set up the card. just plug in the tape deck. it can’t be daisy chained to the RAIDs though. if your RAIDs are on port A, you have to connect the tape to port B and vice versa. i’ve been told that you can’t have random access (hard drives) and linear access (tapes) on the same port. so what happens here is that the tape is effectively eating up half of the available lanes on the SAS card (there are 8 total lanes, 4 per port), even though tape only uses 1 lane of bandwidth. so you won’t be able to add as many RAIDs to your card as you could if you didn’t have the tape attached. there is a practical upper limit to the number of RAIDs that can be daisy-chained and still maintain reasonable speed. with a tape drive taking up half the lanes, this upper limit is lowered. i suggest putting no more than 2 RAIDs on a single port. so once you need a third RAID, you will want to move the LTO to another card and plug this RAID in port B. others may disagree with me on this one, and i’d be curious to know their experiences. but an ATTO H card is only like $300 vs $1000 for the R680. so an H card is more practical for LTO anyway.

btw, only ATTO cards can do this. as far as i know, ATTO is the only company that makes cards that can do both hard drives and tapes on the same card (and only the R-series)

thanks

e

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

[Andrea Barnett]

Hi Marcus,

Just curious what hardware your running with your LTO 4 machine? We are using Tandberg Data with Presstore and are having lots of issues. Just not sure if it’s Tandberg or PresStore….been in constant contact with both for support and no luck so far.

Where I used to work we used StorageDNA and loved it, wish we had it here.

Any light on the subject?

andreajbarnett.com

[Marcus Lyall]

I’ve got a Quantum Iscalar LTO5 thing.
Runs through an ATTO card, I think, into a Mac Pro.

Presstore seemed to be the best of a bad bunch.
We bought the whole lot, Backup and Archive… and never really got Archive working properly.

I used to really like it. But not so keen at the moment.