[Pc_Support] Backing up 1-4TiB: LTO-3, SDLT or SAIT?

[Bryan J. Smith]

I have 1TiB of potential storage that may quickly increase to
up to 4TiB in the future.  The system is a standalone system
of systems (largely Windows 2000 and HP/UX 11), so it
requires its own, local backup solution.

In the past, the company standard has been DLT for production
areas, but LTO has been increasingly deployed.  I think it's
more of a vendor decision (HP) than anything (although I have
already interjected that we might want to start looking at
Copan System's MAID/VTL as an intermedia, near-line storage
buffer between systems and tape).  If I was rolling out tape
for a production area, I'd definitely stick with DLT.  But in
this case, I have a leading-edge, standalone system, and I
really could use a leading-edge performing backup solution.

As such, I'm really looking to LTO, namely LTO-3.  LTO-3
reads LTO-1 and reads/writes LTO-2 and LTO-3.  LTO-4 is
planned.  It is 400GB native with a native transfer rate of
80MBps (double each on average using hardware compression),
pretty much the leader right now.  Tape cartridge media is
one of the cheapest and reliability is typical for the
industry (to get any higher, you'd need to go with an IBM
proprietary).

LTO is a consortium of 3 companies, Certance, HP and IBM,
although that's no guarantee of full compatibility.  But the
multivendor nature does explain popularity.  About 2/3rd of
all new enterprise drive/media sales are LTO according to a
2003 study by SAIC, one of our core partners.

The other options are largely HP SDLT and Sony SAIT.  As I
mentioned, we have DLT in use in production areas, but the
cost, capacity and performance are not what I'd like.  Since
this is a standalone system, and we have deployed LTO-1/2 in
other areas, I'm really trying to think ahead.  Since the
LTO-3 drives can write LTO-2, it seems like a no brainer at
this point, and a good move for the future since LTO-4 should
read (if not write) LTO-3 as well.

On the SDLT front, 300GiB is the latest capacity, but cost
and performance aren't still there.

Sony has its SAIT at a whopping 500GiB native, but the
performance is still lackluster to LTO-3 and newer SDLT.  Not
sure about reliability, although I would be interesting in
considering it if reliability is better.  But the vendor
issue might not be doable.

As such, does anyone have any pros/cons they've personally
dealt with on the formats?  Is there any reason not to go
with LTO?

BTW, I'm considering the HP 1/8 Autoloader with an Ultrium
960 drive, so native capacity is 3.2GiB with a 80GBps
transfer rate over Ultra320 SCSI.  I'm still researching the
hardware support in Symantec (fka Veritas) NetBackup, which
is our standard, but I believe I won't have any issues with
supporting Windows 2000 and HP/UX 11 (although I might have
to use Windows 2000 as the NetBackup buffering server for
both hardware and temporary disk considerations).

SAIC Study (Sponsored by USGS):  
 
http://wgiss.ceos.org/archive/archive.doc/FY03MediaTradeStudy.doc
 



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