Dell Tape drive question - compatiblity

[coffee]

Hi Everyone,

I am putting together a server using an older Dell T610 with a Perc H700 controller running 5 SAS drives. I need to add a tape drive for backups. Can I run one off the existing H700 or do I need another controller card to dedicate to this.

Im looking at just using a Dell Ultrium 3 SATA which I know is an older tape drive but its a matter of budget and compatibility.

If the current H700 controller shouldnt be used then can I install another H700 for the tape drive?

I do not do a lot of servers and I just want to get this right

Thanx,

 

[SimonR]

I just saw this post and wondered if you have made a decision?

The Dell T610 is in a smaller case, in this situation I would go for an external tape drive.
Then connect it using a used (ebay) SAS controller with an external port.
Preferably a generic one like Adaptec, not Dell or HP.
You need to budget for replacing all the tapes every 12 - 18 months.

If disaster strikes and you lose most of the hardware in the Dell.
You could always move the tape drive and hopefully the controller card into some other hardware.
At worst such as a fire and flood, you may only have the offsite tapes left and need to replace all of the hardware.
If at that time you can only get a HP or IBM server, you do not have to worry about strange compatibility issues.
The tape drive should work with any other hardware manufacturer.

Which backup software are you using?
I have always found BackupExec to be the best of a bad bunch.

Just a reminder to get a decent UPS, with auto shutdown software.
APC are very good in my experience. You can buy a used 1500W model cheap and replace the batteries.

Alternatively, do you even need a physical server? could you just create a virtual one in the cloud, with AWS or Azure?

 

[coffee]

I just saw this post and wondered if you have made a decision?

The Dell T610 is in a smaller case, in this situation I would go for an external tape drive.
Then connect it using a used (ebay) SAS controller with an external port.
Preferably a generic one like Adaptec, not Dell or HP.
You need to budget for replacing all the tapes every 12 - 18 months.

If disaster strikes and you lose most of the hardware in the Dell.
You could always move the tape drive and hopefully the controller card into some other hardware.
At worst such as a fire and flood, you may only have the offsite tapes left and need to replace all of the hardware.
If at that time you can only get a HP or IBM server, you do not have to worry about strange compatibility issues.
The tape drive should work with any other hardware manufacturer.

Which backup software are you using?
I have always found BackupExec to be the best of a bad bunch.

Just a reminder to get a decent UPS, with auto shutdown software.
APC are very good in my experience. You can buy a used 1500W model cheap and replace the batteries.

Alternatively, do you even need a physical server? could you just create a virtual one in the cloud, with AWS or Azure?

Thanks for the reply, But I have solved the issue.

Went with an internal and a SAS controller card for the Dell. The tape drive is a 3tb which will do great for what they have going on. Lots of room to get everything.

For backups, Nothing beats tar or rsync for the system and data. However, This is a Linux server I am setting up. Appreciate the thoughts.

Running a windows vm on top of centos. Then I am using Icewarp to handle the role of exchange on the server. A lot less expensive and does a great job so far (Its been about 2 months). I was going to run an Active Directory setup but I ditched that and just setup shares in centos. AD really isnt needed in a single server situation really. Especially when running linux.

The system is setup so that a windows vm runs for some third party software that they use for the business. Then all services like dhcp, DNS, File server, firewall are handled thru centos. It uses half the memory that their windows SBS server did and is quite a bit quicker

My next project is migrating their email server from a third party to the centos box. This should turn out pretty fun.

Thanks,

 

[SimonR]

I'm sorry, I presumed you wanted Windows only.
Tar is alright until you type in the wrong device name and fill the hard disk

I use tar and rsync to backup my Linux machines.

Instead of exim, have you thought about Office 365 for the email?

 

[coffee]

A lot of the clients I have in the business side of things do not believe in online storage or software. That is to say, They want their data stored local with backups off site in secure places. I know everyone is running to the 'cloud' to do all their storage but I have to agree that there will come a time when all that data will be stolen - if not already.

I already have the email server up and running. I just have to migrate their third party email to it. I am taking my time because I have a lot of work to do as this was a SBS with 13 workstations that had not seen any maintenance for about 3 years. Things were just band-aided along the way and so I have to dig thru it and correct everything. Take a while to do that.

Ultimately, I will have them setup with their own email server, Access to their calendars and email via VPN and plenty of storage on the local server.

Since this is a small company they can get a long very well with a raid5 for their data. I also backup their vm and data daily to the raid and then everything goes to tape. The daily tape goes off site for the night with an employee to return in the morning.

The VM shuts down at night. Its backed up to as an appliance and then restarted. Then the O/S and all the data. Working very well

Thanks,

coffee

 

[SimonR]

I had my main client lose their data twice with servers.

Once they had 1 disk fail, so they swapped all the disks around then booted up SBS2003.
The first I knew about it was the next day.
The person responsible for changing the backup tapes was a junior member of staff.
I emailed them every few days about the failed backups, but they just ignored me.
After two weeks work and a very large bill, I managed to recover most of their data.

The second time, they had a lot of building work going on.
I offered to go to their office free of charge and disconnect the server and move it somewhere safe.
They left it running, the constant power outages and dust damaged the disks and RAID controller.
Again they weren't backing up properly, because they physically coudn't get to the server to change the tapes.

They now have standalone PC's with everything stored in the cloud,
they also have a backup of their critical files on an external hard disk on site.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Tape DRIVE?? Really? 1999 called it wants it's outdated tech back. Cloud backups or at least to external HDDs or NAS units. I really have to question why anyone would offer tapes up as a solution in this day. Tapes are slow, break, have alignment issues and now are very expensive. As to the data will be stolen argument. That is why you encrypt it.

 

[coffee]

I certainly understand your point. In an analogy, If they cant drive a car I guess they should take the bus.

I would think that one time having their data lost because they didnt do their backups would cure many ills. But you never can tell with a lot of these businesses.

I had a 'Meet and Greet' with a new client and I was looking over their server. They over spent and bought a IBM running AIX and a tape drive. The secretary let me look at the logs for the backups to tape and I could clearly see an error message every day: VERIFY FAILED.

I told them about this and it should be resolved as they might not actually have any backups to restore from. However, I was brushed aside and told not to worry about it.

No matter what you do, Some people are destined to fail. Even if you backup to the cloud you have to have something in place to acknowledge that the backup was successful. This is where the weak link is and they will not pay any attention to it either. So, The best answer is to have a contract with them to make sure things run right. Well, Had they done that with you in the first place they would not have had to go to the cloud for storage.

You know, This reminds me of Yahoo. They were broken into and everyones information was stolen. They didnt acknowledge this for almost a year or so.

However, I can see your point as some people are just not very responsible.

 

[coffee]

Tape DRIVE?? Really? 1999 called it wants it's outdated tech back. Cloud backups or at least to external HDDs or NAS units. I really have to question why anyone would offer tapes up as a solution in this day. Tapes are slow, break, have alignment issues and now are very expensive. As to the data will be stolen argument. That is why you encrypt it.

I can understand the external hard drives. However, In this situation none of those solutions would work. This is why they have a tape drive. You see, In this community where my client is at they have the worst internet in the world. I kid you not. They might as well not even have it. I can not even think of trying to backup to a off site NAS as it would simply never finish in time and the next backup would be scheduled. Also, Restoring from a nas would be absolutely horrid.

As for a external hard drive? Well, I can see it being dropped by employees and failing pretty quick.

There are certain situations that demand certain answers. This is one of them that you have just jumped in without any knowledge of the situation. The pros and cons of how to backup with what media do not apply here in this situation. There is one answer that does work and that is a tape drive. Until things improve - and it may not because this is a very politically charged topic in their community - they should stick with what works for them.

Thanks for your thoughts,

 

[fencepost]

There's a lot of appeal to having local backups to a NAS or external hard drive just for the convenience of quick restores ("Hey, my folder is gone! I was using it last month.") but with poor Internet tape doesn't seem like a bad option as a way to get at least occasional off-site backups.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Tapes are too finicky. Back in the day, I had plenty of clients that were swapping out despooled tapes and never knew they had a problem until the server went belly up. I've also had plenty of issues doing restores of backups from tape. Alignment nightmares. worn out tapes, dead drive units. And tape is INCREDIBLY slow. Hard drives are cheap and fast. If they drop one so what? Sell them another one.

If you can't do online backups then I would have a LOCAL NAS for backup and then have HDD backups from the NAS unit that are carried off-site.

And frankly with a proper seeded backup even on DSL you can do online backups of the changed files. Restoring files is a bitch but that is why you have the NAS unit.

 

[nlinecomputers]

There are also RDX units that have form factors like tape drives but are actually hard drive units. Kinda expensive now but often more sturdy than USB hard drive caddies.

 

[fencepost]

I'm not sure "slow" can still be applied to modern LTO tapes - a terabyte per hour uncompressed sounds pretty impressive to me, particularly if you're also able to regularly get 2:1 compression for "average" data to basically double that speed.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah we used to use those Tandy RDX drives a LOT (way back when). Many other brands also resold them...Dell, HP, but the OEM brand was Tandy. The cartridge was actually a 2.5" laptop drive inside. Faster and more durable than tape.....those kinda went the way of the ISA card and floppy disks!

 

[coffee]

Im going to start a thread in the 'Tech eyes only in a minute to explain why a tape drive and some interesting things about a city and politics ect...

I have to have a smoke first

 

[SimonR]

This thread reminded me of something from the dim and distant past.

A customer had a corrupt database and the support department gave up at 10PM.
The customer had a 24 hour contract and I was on call.
After a 240 mile drive, I arrived in the early hours of the morning.
The support department wanted me to restore the whole database from the last backup.
The last few days backups all seemed to have blank tapes.
They were using DDS1 DAT tapes and I expected the size of the data to fit on more than one tape.
Looking at the paper backup logs, only showed one tape been used.
Viewing the online log, revealed a second tape was used.

I managed to find the night manager responsible for doing the backup.
I asked him to show me how to do a backup, he put the next tape in and started the backup.
That was great, I asked him if anything happened after about two hours.
Yes, the tape pops out and you have to push it back in and press the enter key on the keyboard.
We had a brief conversion about what would happen if he wanted to
record a 90 minute TV programme with a 60 minute VHS tape, he then had a light bulb moment.

After reading the technical manual of the database, I found the corrupt file was not a data file, but only used for indexing.
After creating a new index file, the database was back working again before the day shift started.