If you would rather go with a direct attached tape drive solution, you might want to look at Apcon's Single-Ended/Differential converter.
I've had mine for a year, and not a problem.
I first used it to connect a F740 to a single-ended drive, then later connected a F330 to a differential drive, when I upgraded my tape library from DLT4000's to DLT7000's. (I purchased the ACI-1080CW.)
http://www.apcon.com/differential.html
"Rainchik, Aleksandr (MED, Non GE)" wrote:
Hello,
We have F720 NetApp that holds about 100Gb of data and we are backing it up trough the network, not with directly connected tape. Why? F720 comes with differential port for tape connection and our nice tape library is all single-ended.
We are using Budtool to do that and it's all done via NDMP.
And what we have is 1024 K/sec backup speed. So it takes about a 24 hours to finish Level 0 on filer. There is a Sun E450 on the same subnet, plugged to the same switch, both at 100 full-duplex, going to the same media server. And backups are 3 times faster there.
Is there something I can tweak on filer? Like change priority of ndmpd process, something to speed up backups?
Can you let me know what is your backup speed in NetApp/Budtool configuration?
Thank you.
P.S. We are thinking about getting differential to single-ended SCSI converters. Any experience with such converters?
-- Matthew Lee Stier * Fujitsu Network Communications Unix Systems Administrator | Two Blue Hill Plaza Ph: 914-731-2097 Fx: 914-731-2011 | Sixth Floor Matthew.Stier@fnc.fujitsu.com * Pearl River, NY 10965