Backing Up 100 Gigs in an Hour? 79
cybrthng asks: "I am faced with finding a backup solution capable of archiving to tape about 200 gigs of a financials data in a 2 hour window. I originally looked into DLT8000 Jukeboxes with 2-4 drives but have recently discovered the new LTO drives. I am interested in knowing real world experiences with these drives as there has to be a catch. I mean there is a 3 fold performance increase in data transfers, two fold increase in tape capacity and a minimal price increase overall. With these drastic differences is there something I'm giving up with LTO over DLT or vice versa? Which backup applications are more geared to handling volume and integrate with Oracle RDBMS? Restoring speed is even more critical then backup speed so i'm curious about how these two drives compare and which applications are best geared for this much data on a nightly bases. Mind you there will also be about 500 gigs of data in an end-of-week backup as well."
Why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy - History. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy - History. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why... (Score:5, Funny)
Your "backups" are toast.
Floods, tornadoes, fires, etc happen. Sometimes people fly planes into buildings. When that happens, tapes are the only thing that keeps your business in business.
Re:Why... (Score:5, Informative)
I know this is completely off topic, but sometimes tape just isn't cost effective, particularly when you figure in the costs of manually storing and maintaining a library of data tapes in a vault somewhere. (Most of that cost is in head count: you have to pay somebody to do that work, and that's not a $19,000 a year job.)
We're presently doing the cost analysis on a kind of radical idea. We're storing many terabytes of data in a data center in San Jose, California. The data center is as good as it can be, but there's still the danger (however unlikely) of earthquake or some other drastic event.
Rather than trying to back everything up to data tape, we've gotten pricing from a telco on a dark fiber link between the San Jose data center and another data center somewhere in Colorado-- can't remember where. Since we're already putting an HDS 9960 in the San Jose data center, we can put an identical one in Colorado and use the 9960's internal "NanoCopy" software to keep them in sync.
Believe it or not, it's working out to be more cost effective. One of the big reasons is that keeping that much tape on-line in a data center would require a StorageTek PowderHorn silo, and data center floor space is expensive. The difference in cost between the floor space and the dark fiber is so small that they cancel out.
Like I said, I realize this is light-years away from what the poster was originally asking about, but it's kinda neat nonetheless.
Re:Why... (Score:1)
Re:Why... (Score:2)
The system we're talking about is itself an archive. It doesn't get backed up, per se; it just gets replicated.
Given that our archive is going to be about 80 TB when installed, your "multiple generations on an off-site rotation" idea, besides being totally unnecessary, is frankly impractical in the extreme.
The other is the single failure point of the telecom line.
At about US$53,000 per month for dark fibre, the penalty clauses in the contract with the telco are such that if the connection goes down for more than one minute, we get paid so much money that we can pay off our penalty clauses and, believe it or not, actually make a small profit.
You make a good point about tape, but it's not really relevant to our situation. For instance, we could use a StorageTek Powderhorn LSM to replicate our archive, but we'd either have to put on staff to manage thousands of 9840 tapes off line (the LSM only holds 6,000 tapes) or buy multiple LSMs. The amount of floor space that would require would cost us much more than the dark fibre.
Re:Why... (Score:1)
Re:Why... (Score:2)
You're thinking of the AML/2. The AML/E was discontinued some time ago, I believe. It topped out at 10,386 tapes. The AML/2 can store up to 76,608 tapes, or 5,184 TB. Very big, true.
The Powderhorn with ACSLS control can hold up to 144,000 tapes. That's 9,640 TB. Biggest tape library in the world, as far as I know.
The PetaSite from Sony is pretty frigging big, too, but I don't know exactly how big. I'm not sure how many racks you can chain together with their extension robotics.
True story: originally Sony Broadcast and Professional was planning to market the DMS 8000 series of tape systems in the US and Canada under the name "PetaFile." Say it out loud and you'll know why they didn't.
Re:Why... (Score:1)
Not to mention pity for the junior network tech who gets the job of loading 144,000 tapes.
Re:Why... (Score:2)
Wanna hear something funny? Our first quote on a Powderhorn (one silo, 6,000 slots) had something like $240,000 in it for the tapes. A quarter of a million dollars just for the tapes themselves. Unbelievable.
Needless to say, I haven't asked for itemized quotes from StorageTek since then. I just don't want to know.
Re:Why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Off Site Backup (Score:3, Insightful)
Your "backups" are toast.
Floods, tornadoes, fires, etc happen. Sometimes people fly planes into buildings. When that happens, tapes are the only thing that keeps your business in business.
No, actually it is off site backups that save your ass. All the tapes in the world won't save your ass unless you have carried backup sets off site.
Off Site Backups can be done with harddisks too. The main advantage of tapes it they are usually less fragile than hard disks, but the costs of the tapes for some large capacity tape backup systems are higher per MB than the multi GB consumer IDE disks and they don't provide random access.
An idea I had for backups was to have a system be a mirror for the main disks. As the day went on it would mirror all the changes to the main file server. At 6PM or so (end of busisness day plus an hour) the current DB after image file would be copied to the mirror and mirror would be broken, the disks pulled, and a set from the week before installed. The mirror would then be restarted bringing the old backups up to date. The removed set would then go home as the current offsite backup. Tape and DB backups would happen as normal. The DB backup would be written to a partition on the disk set. I would think this become infeasable if one has to backup more than 4 to 8 disks worth. At this point that could be more than one TB. There would be a set of disks for each day of the week. Weekly tape backups would be the long term archive, while the disk sets would be the offsite backup.
Re:Why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why... (Score:1, Flamebait)
You can get 600 gigs for $3000 in shock resistant laptop hard drives. Still 3 times as much data for the same price.
Do you work for a tape drive manufacturer? I have never heard of a tape drive fanboy. Sure there are AMD, Intel, ATI and Nvidia fanboys but not tape drive fanboys. You must have considerable finacial liability associated with tape drives. Or you are trying to justify tapes because your boss reads
You must be an old guy afraid to move on to better technology because you have always done it the same way. Well, I'm an old guy too but I gave up my 75 baud rubber cup phone modem in 1983.
Re:Why... (Score:3, Informative)
The safety deposit box we use for month end tapes is just the right size for 3 rows of 12 tapes as well
is removable necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mammoth2 drives (Score:1)
Re:Mammoth2 drives (Score:1)
Re:Mammoth2 drives [retraction] (Score:1)
Disregard my post.
Re:Mammoth2 drives [retraction] (Score:2)
Quite a feat (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm afraid that your only realistic options are to either get a larger window, which is probably unlikely, or perform live backups and bear the performance degradation during that time. The only other alternative that I can think of would be to mirror your data to secondary disk based storage and then backup the secondary storage off line. Any which way, I'd be amazed if you got 100 Gig an hour.
Speedy LTO (Score:1)
To tape or not?? (Score:1)
Re:To tape or not?? (Score:2)
Off topic (again), but FYI the HP and Sun storage solutions are OEM'd by Hitachi.
The Sun StorEdge 9910 and StorEdge 9960 are HDS 9910 and 9960 with different skins on them. Likewise, the HP XP48 is an HDS 9910 and the XP512 is the HDS 9960, so named for the number of disks in each (48 and 512).
Re:To tape or not?? (Score:1)
IDE Raid (Score:1)
The problem with this is that to restore a file older then a week or so (once it's off the disk array) we need to restore the whole backup set which can take hours. Were useing Backupexec on Windows 2000 so I'm sure whatever software you guys are useing is more flexable.
This might offer a cheap solution to your problem, good luck!
Re:IDE? You ignorant shit! (Score:1, Funny)
I run a major financial bank institution on a bunch of overclocked Athlon XP's. we use IDE RAID and linux 2.4.10.
Re:IDE? You ignorant shit! (Score:3, Insightful)
That sound you hear is the rustling of ten million "withdrawl" slips being hurriedly filled out.
Re:IDE Raid (Score:2)
I put in a PO to have a seperate server doing the backups through a gigabit network, but not necessarily to dump the data locally. Just to offload the cpu from the production environment since in reality it is a hot backup i'm working with and the 2 hour window is the only time i have where there are not batch processes running that could really kill my backup times.
Boy do i hate 24/7 systems
AIT/2/3/4 tape libraries. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:AIT/2/3/4 tape libraries. (Score:2)
Re:AIT/2/3/4 tape libraries. (Score:1)
Striping tapes is a bad idea, but if the data is readily divisible (not a single 200GB dbdump) you would be fine backing up one portion per drive in a quad AIT-2 or dual AIT-3 configuration, with room to grow.
If you can't divide the data, backing up to disk and streaming to tape later is the best option. Most client-server backup software will allow you to establish a disk-based target and subsequently copy the data to tape.
-Bryce
Re:AIT/2/3/4 tape libraries. (Score:2, Informative)
each ait-2 tape is the size of a small pack of cigarettes and really cheap. the tape library itself with 30 tapes loaded can be carried fairly easily under your arm if you want to go lugging it around as a portable device. its about as heavy as a computer monitor and about as bulky.
get ait-3/4 which will double or quadriple the capacity per tape while retaining the same tape size if you have the budget for it. AIT3/4 should also give you around 200 gigs per hour or more.
BTW, i use an sun E420R to whack data across to the library.
Mirrors and Backups (Score:2, Insightful)
However, you aren't the first person to have this problem, and I'm sure Oracle as solved this problem. If it's as important as you say, I would pay them for this knowledge.
Why push the tape envelope so hard? (Score:2)
Well, cost I suppose, but the 2 hour window will probably shrink over time, while the 200GB will turn into 250 and 300GB, so you always end up chasing the most expensive tape technologies to keep up.
As far as the DLT vs. LTO question, I don't know much about LTO in production use, but DLT is so widely used and trusted it would seem to have more of an incumbent status as the technology of choice. I ended up using AIT 50/100GB tapes -- cheaper media, faster than DLT, smaller tapes (easier to carry lots off-site), larger 'jukebox' designs available, and higher capacity (at the time I made that decision). It's worked well and I've never regretted it.
Re:Why push the tape envelope so hard? (Score:2)
We do this on week end/month end backups though as we can shutdown the applications and have a clean backup.
You can still use HD's... (Score:1)
BTW, Data is on EMC's (Score:2)
I can add 32 more drives into the EMC and setup an addition BCV pair to mirror on and then backup from the broken mirror, but the cost is just about the same as buying a 4 drive, 20 slot changer.
This is financial data responsible for nearly a billion dollars of revenue a year so using extra disks to offload before the backups are an option, simply not using a tape solution isn't an option.
hope that helps heh
Re:BTW, Data is on EMC's (Score:2)
Just a thought....
Re:BTW, Data is on EMC's (Score:1)
Re:BTW, Data is on EMC's (Score:1)
This is an Ask EMC, not an Ask Slashdot question!
Re:BTW, Data is on EMC's (Score:1)
I like the idea of using a RAID set as a intermediate step here. You need to sustain an average transfer rate of about 28 MB/sec the entire 60 minutes. Most jukeboxes I have looked at take 30sec or so to swap out a tape and set up the new one for writing and tape drives take a few seconds to ramp up to their full data rate and drop off from time to time to position etc. This is going to cost you some time and up the peak rate of that transfer number so it can average out to 28MB/sec.
I have used drives from AMPEX corp that sustain 15MB/sec and store 300GB per tape. That was 2 years ago and they have a newer product out now that was supposed to double that rate but I have no first hand experience with those in the real world.
Since we are talking about an Oracle database here I would also look at the plug-in modules for some of the backup software products. I know Legato NetWorker has such a module and will also allow disk storage to be used. I use NetWorker here to backup about 1TB/Wk. and it gets the job done. It should (if the module works as advertised) be able to quickly backup the database to RAID, then clone those backups to tape.
HP Ultirum AutoLoader + Amanda RealWorld stats (Score:1)
The AutoLoader is SPOT ON. I have the LVD version of the library ( they make a fiberchannel ), and am running it on a 32bit pci U2W tekram scsi card.
Actually, real world throughput ( from the spooling disks, not the network ) is 13MB/sec. The spool is two ATA100 100MB drives, striped together, each on it's own channel from a single promise controller, using the 'md' driver.
The autoloader delivers. They are stackable, and the robot/loader is capable of inverting and passing vertically around the stack. Love HP hardware engineers.
Here is last nights statistics: DAMNED LAMENESS FILTER!!! Heavily edited now:
That looks AWFULL now. Comeon guys, at the risk of some ascii art, and for the sake of some tables, could you allow the <pre> tags?Anyone use an LTO drive? (Score:2)
Re:Anyone use an LTO drive? (Score:1)
It backs up faster than data can be sent to it - there must be plenty of headroom on the faster models. The client was just using a bunch of intel servers though, no high powered SANs or anything to back up.
No idea on reliability yet though - no probs so far (still less than a year). They get hot though, so don't cram them in a crowded server.
Not such a big deal... (Score:4, Insightful)
First, you need to consider how the data is getting to your backup server. This looks like a job for gig-e. (since you don't really want to run you DBs on the same machine as your backup server.) You should use multiple streams. (either break it into multiple smaller jobs or enable the multiple streams option in your backup software if it has one. Many do.) It's hard to flood even a 10base network with a single TCP/IP connection. (your bandwidth utilization decreases in inverse proportion with your latency. I forget the exact formula though.)
Next there's how you're getting it to tape. I recommend running the backups to disk first if you can. This means you won't stall a network connection if you change tapes, or the like. But it does mean you need a lot of storage on the bkup server. Also, if that's a 2h from DB to tape window, this might not be useful. However, barring using a SAN and snapshots (or the like) your only other option is to go straight to tape.
To go straight to tape you'll need at least 6 DLT drives, assuming you can keep the tape streaming and get 6Mbytes/s, and you balance them across a wide enough SCSI and PCI bus(or whatever system bus you choose) This will give you N+1 redundancy and meet your bandwidth requirement of 28Mbytes/s.
As for the LTO/DLT trade off. We're moving to an LTO solution where I work, and it generally seems to be the way to go. It's worth evaluating, but I don't think your choice of tape either way should be your restricting factor. And there is something to be said for the reliability of DLT.
Re:Not such a big deal... (Score:2)
cheers,
mike
A different take on the HD idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand that you would want and need to keep the data off-site on tape (requirement). However, getting that transfer rate is going to be difficult. Perhaps you could do something like this:
Use the hard drive backup (SCSI RAID perhaps?) idea to backup the data quickly and reliably. THEN, you've got it backed up in your time limit. Now, you can back up that back up with a tape, but you don't have the incredible time requirement. Get it?
Concept:
Original Data on Hard Drive
--> Back it up onto a separate Hard Drive within the time limit
--> Now, back up that hard drive that has just backed up the original. You have a backup done already, so you've met the time needed. Now, you can back it up with tape or whatever without having to do it within such a short amount of time. You can use the technology you desire to back up the hard drive copy while the original data drive keeps working.
Then to restore, you can do it from whatever the removable media is.
Again, I don't know a ton about this, but it's just a thought of another way to accomplish this.
Ideas (Score:1)
Re:Ideas (Score:1)
Not high tech, but... (Score:2)
We thought of using SCSI, but the cost/MB was to high. The server had a Promise UltraATA 100 card with four 40GB WD hard drives and a single 10GB WD hard drive on the on-board IDE for the op system. The case had 5 external bays, four housing the sleds for the 40GB drives and one held the CD-Rom. The 40GB drives were whipped up in RAID to create a single 120GB volume (last drive for parity)
I realize it's not really an enterprise class sollution, but it provided the fastest backup and restores for our money.
My 2 cents - sure to be repeated (Score:1)
Back the files from the disk array to tape.
You should come in under your window w/ the net xfer. You have all day to write tapes.
Simple solution (Score:1)
Why the two-hour time window? (Score:2)
You can use snapshots to back-up your data at a "reasonable" pace.
If near instant-restores are a necessity, consider creating an off-site BVC using FC/AL over fiber.
it's straight forward (Score:4, Informative)
Storage is all that I do for a living. Here's a quick summary of how you could do it:
1) First you have to make sure that the drives you have your data on are going to be able to give you the read rates that you need. I highly suggest that you go with a raid array of some sort. Preferrably one with substantial cache in front of it. The raid controller should be smart enough to do what's called "read ahead" caching. That reduces the read miss ratio and speeds up sequential (i.e. backup) applications tremendously.
2) Get whatever tape drive you choose. Base your decision on the speed of the device - use only the native performance. LTO is either 15mb/s or 16mb/s depending on whos drive you get. It is safe to assume that you will get about 1.2x compression. So for LTO that would get you either 18mb/s or 19.2mb/s. Assuming you get the 15mb/s drive you can realistically expect to get ~64GB/hr per drive.
3) You have to get some sort of advanced backup package to support those rates. I would suggest that you go with either Veritas NetBackup, Legato Networker, SyncSort Backup Express, or any of the enterprise class products. Don't go with cheap software - in general they do not have the performance coding necessary to move data at very high rates efficiently. This is a hard choice, but if you stick with the three I told you, you should do fine.
4) Get a library that can handle several drives, so that you can use them in parallel.
5) Put each tape drive on a separate scsi bus, or if you go with fibre channel put at most 3 drives on the channel. There's a ton of way of architecting this side of the house, but in general if you stick with those numbers, you should be fine.
6) Try not to send data over the network, even with GigE, the effective rates are going to be drastically slower than those of direct attached devices. GigE also severely impacts the server - tcp/ip overhead is a bear for high throughput environments. There are ways around this, but that ouside the scope of this email
That should do it for you for the traditional backup methodology. There are other ways of doing backups - making mirrors that you can split of. Taking snapshots..... There are a ton of products that can help you on this. Some of them are software based packages that sit on the server with the data. Some of them are hardware/software devices that sit on a SAN or a NAS. Again, going into this is quite lengthy, but it can be done. I have a customer for which we are doing over 1TB/hr backups using a combination of lots of tools. You problem is quite a bit simpler.
Cost vs. Effectiveness... (Score:2)
Looking at what your setup is, I can say that you really have three options:
Honestly, I would prefer the last option. You already need a backup host machine with FC connectivity and enterprise backup software in any of the scenarios. Adding a 100GB A1000 (or D1000) to this is only going to run $10k or so, and you don't need a massively expensive FC tape library, or the EMC snapshot software. It'll grow with your backup needs, and is relatively inexpensive. And you can keep last nights (or a couple of nights) worth of backups on the A1000 for fast recovery. Disks in an A1000 are much cheaper than for an EMC.
I'd go with something like the Sun L20 mid-size (2 LTO drives, 20 cartridges, 2TB total) with a 200GB A1000. Sun list is about $35k for these together.
-Erik
Use a two step process (Score:1)
1. Backup to an separate system, onto its hard drives.
2. Tape backup the separate system.
You get speed, and your tape requirement.
Don't depend on just HDD's for media (Score:2)
*Fast!
*Cheap!
*Easy!
Unfortunately,
*Reliable!
isn't something you're going to get. Also, when you consider that you may want to be able to restore something that was deleted, say 6 months or a year ago, your media costs begin to outweigh your equipment costs. Also, a hard drive is going to be physically larger than a tape holding the same amount of data, requiring more expensive off-site storage. You do take your backups offsite, don't you? What about a flood, fire, or (gasp) terrorist attack? What about a break-in?
Another reason to not depend solely on hard drives for backup: the shelf-life of a tape is much longer than a hard drive. Fifty years from now, you'll still be able to read today's backup on tape, but the mechanics of a HDD used for backup (even if it hasn't been used) may be all goobered up rendering the drive DEAD. I won't go into handling considerations, except to tell you what you know already: hard drives are fragile.
That said, I like the idea of setting up a mirror server which updates from the master server, then running the backup on the mirror server. This'll increase your window and reduce the load on the master server.
Lastly, make sure you understand the difference between full, incremental, and differential backups. Use them to your advantage to balance price, speed, load, and storage (where you're gonna store your tapes) considerations.
Re:Don't depend on just HDD's for media (Score:1)
Would they not have to recover the DB somewhere else ?
Nothing beats a good backup... (slightly offtopic) (Score:2)
I know people who slack off when it comes to backups, because they've got redundant drives, after all. They seem to believe that they never accidently delete files, and it's not that much work to recreate those quarterly reports. They don't realize just how much work they do on their computers, and how hard it is to retrieve that thought that came to them as they were typing up that letter to their congressmen.
Just today, one of my clients had an IDE drive on a RAID-0/1 array fail. The controller (two channels, four drives) misreported which drive it was. Now, it only shows one drive in a four drive array as being a member. Here's hoping a new controller which will arrive tomorrow will allow us to rescue the data.
No, they don't have a backup for ~100GB of data. Fools. I guess they've got a few spare months kicking around to recreate several hundred thousand pages of digital documents.
A RAID array is great for performance gains. In a production environment, it'll guarantee uptime while a bad drive is replaced or until the system can be taken offline. Don't trust a RAID controller that puts two IDE drives on the same channel; sometimes, a failed drive will prevent the system from being able to access the "good" drive on the same channel, bringing down your system. If reliablilty and uptime are important and can be measured in $$$, don't even THINK about IDE RAID solutions. The increased support costs for IDE are more than the increased hardware costs for SCSI.
I've actually got one... (Score:1)
The data being backed up was coming off a EXP300 external RAID array (again, IBM), conencted via Ultra160 SCSI.
The only bad thing I can say about this drive is that we are on our second unit. A tape got jammed into the first one, and was destroyed in the process. IBM was good about getting a replacement here, however.
Re:I've actually got one... (Score:1)
Umm, I hope this is a typo. We're talking about an LTO drive?
I get about 4.5G in an hour on an OS/2 server running a DDS3 DAT drive, plus about the same for a verify pass. I don't consider this an enterprise level backup (It's for a pretty small business.)
Using 9840 drives over FC at the data center I used to work at, we got 10M/s, best case. 9840 drives are pretty fast, but lots slower than LTO. I'd hope for at least double what the 9840 did.
Re:I've actually got one... (Score:1)
It was a typo, I meant to say 100Gb in approx 1h 15min.
My only experience with this drive has been backing up hundreds of gigs of jpegs. I haven't actually had a chance to use it to backup more compressable data (if such a thing exists?)
backup questions! (Score:1)
Any discussion about backup solutions of ANY kind will turn into a flamewar about whether current, huge, cheap hard disks are better for backup than tapes.
The way we do it (Score:1)
We do have an EMC, but we don't use it for backups (GASP!). Instead we use it as fast,fast,fast storage LUNS where our databases live. Once EMC's snapshot software catches up to us, we'll snapshot a LUN and then spool it out to tape.
In the meantime, depending on the size and activity of the database being backed up, we'll either to a database export out to NAS (Maxtor 4400s) and then have our Veritas NetBack server with an ATL autloader (2 LTO drives and holds 20 tapes) back up that, or we'll do a backup directly from Oracle, SQL or the server itself.
Backing up to the NAS units works well for our large databases, because we've had issues with NetBack aborting backup jobs when doing direct backups because it wasn't finished by the time the backup window closed.
Quick backup suggestions (Score:1)
LTO and TSM (Score:1)
Cheers,
makath99
Re:LTO and TSM (Score:1)