We are purchasing a F760 and are faced with the usual backup dilemma. To backup our F630 we have a single drive DLT robot (Breece Hill Q2.15) and use local dumps. This takes 15+ hours a day (3 tapes) and obviously doesn't scale well. So we are investigating larger robots with multiple tape drives. Currently the StorageTek 9730 is looking interesting.
The problem we have is by using local dumps we need the tape robot to autoload the drives. Moreover with a multi drive robot the autoload function needs to be able to control which slots are loaded into which drives. Anyone know of the StorageTek supports this? Any other recommendations multi drive 28+ slot tape robots are also welcome.
FYI. The reason we aren't just stacking two Breece Hill Q2.15's is that we have been underwhelmed with the usability and quality of these boxes. We find the documentation and user interface to be quite poor. (And they never delivered the S/W upgrade they promised)
The reason we aren't using an NDMP backup S/W package is that the nature of the data on this box requires a "level 0" backup every night. Most of the features of the NDMP S/W would never be needed (indexing, etc.) and therefore be an unnecessary expense.
Graydon Dodson (606) 232-6483 grdodson@lexmark.com Lexmark International Inc.