Hello,
Sorry for the delay.
Here is what people use for backups (from most used to least used):
Software:
Home made scripts
Legato
EpochBackup
Hardware:
Exabyte 8500 (xl,c, other flavours)
DAT
Exabyte 8200
A type a tape drive called Digital Linear Tape (from DEC) seems to
be becoming popular. I am told it is the fastest tape drive I can find
on the market right now and it stores 20GB worth of data on a tape. I do not
know if this is compressed.
Speed: Here is a list of the various combination of software and hardware
and the speed these people get.
Legato + Exabyte 8500C (jukebox): 10 GB in 7-8 hours with short peeks at 700K/sec
tape drive is local.
Legato + Exabyte 8500 (stacker): compressed data at 500k/sec when no net probs
and fast clients.
Legato + mirrored Exabyte: 10GB in ten hours over ethernet.
Home made scripts + Exabyte 8505: 2GB in 1.5 hour, half of it over ethernet.
Home made scripts + Exabyte 8500: 3GB in 2:18 hours. The tape seems to be local.
Home made C soft. + Exabyte 8500: 370K/sec (average) over network.
Home made perl + Exabyte 8500C : 25GB in 28 hours over network.
EpochBackup + HP optical library + Exabyte jukebox: performance was not a
criteria. Users can recover
their own files.
Home made C++ + Exabyte 8200 + Exabyte 8500 : 1.5GB in 2 hours. 63K record size.
Unknown software + Auspex + 2 Exabyte 8500c : 720K/sec. I assume drive is local
to the Auspex.
Legato + 4 Exabyte 8500st : 100GB in 24 hours.
Backup server is on cddi. 90% is
over ethernet. Data is compressed
by the client before it is sent.
EpochBackup + Exabyte 8505xl : 2GB in one hour.
Home made scripts + Exabyte 8500 : 1GB in one hour over ethernet.
Unknown soft. + DAT : 1.5GB in 40 minutes. Drive is local
Home made scripts + Exabyte 8200 : 1.8GB in 2:20 over ethernet.
So it seems that the most limiting factor is the network and then the speed
of the tape. So the solution would be get a faster network and get faster
tapes or write to multiple tapes in parallel.
Legato and EpochBackup do multi-platform backups.
My next step will be to go and see how a Digital Linear Tape (DLT) works, I was
able to find a site here that has one. I'll be evaluating Legato and EpochBackup.
I'll also try an evaluate the possibility of having a backup server on the
backbone (cddi) with tapes connected to it.
I would like to thank the following people for their answers:
Henry Katz <hkatz@lehman.com>
Nate Mann AP35-1008 x4774 <ndmann@tacl.dnet.ge.com>
Jan van Doorn <jdoorn@nl.oracle.com>
William Charles <william@wet.sbi.com>
Richard Davis <rad@getech.leeds.ac.uk>
gdonl@gv.ssi1.com (Don Lewis)
"Kevin A. Noll" <knoll@csl-emh2.army.mil>
don@mars.dgrc.doc.ca (Donald McLachlan)
pluta@eda.mke.ab.com (Rick Pluta)
"A. Bryan Curnutt" <curnutt@Stoner.COM>
Pat Max <pam@fimad1.lanl.gov>
nishan@lambo.alldata.com (Nishan Sandhar)
feldt@phyast.nhn.uoknor.edu (Andy Feldt)
Nate Itkin <Nate-Itkin@ptdcs2.al.intel.com>
pamela@Legato.COM (Pamela Pledger)
frenette@netcom.com (Dan Frenette)
rgjj490@wadnr.gov (rocky gould)
Daniel Quinlan <danq@spot.Colorado.EDU>
epl@Kodak.COM (Gene Loriot (epl@kodak.com))
glenn@uniq.com.au (Glenn Satchell - Uniq Professional Services)
suzanneb@imagin1.com (Suzanne Bryant)
Robert Velthuizen <velt@splinter.rad.usf.edu>
The original question was:
>Hello all,
>I would like to know what is the maximum backup rate you can achieve and what
>setup you use to do the backups. The case that is of interest to me is doing
>backups of our unix machines. In a not too far future, this could also
>extend to DOS, NT, and Mac machines.
>Here we use home made csh scripts with an exabyte 8200 tapedrive. The backups
>are done via our network which is local ethers and an FDDI/CDDI backbone.
>The rate we are able to achieve is 1.5 gig in 3 hours, which is to me
>a worse than awful performance.
>I'm in the process of trying to solve the backup performance problem
>forever. I would just like to know how did you people solve it?
Yves Lepage
yves@cc.mcgill.ca
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:09:10 CDT