Michael> I'm looking for a cheap DLT system to transfer data and do
Michael> some limited backups on a Beowulf. The system we have looked
Michael> at is an ADIC DLT7000 seven tape library, for a total of
Michael> 490MB (compressed). There are two problems:
Michael> 1) ADIC doesn't have Linux drivers, but would support and
Michael> attempt to create them.
I assume you're asking for drivers to move tapes around in the
jukebox? The ADIC should be able to be put into simple stacker mode,
so that if you start at the first tape and fill it up, it will then
automatically move to the next tape.
Also, look for various tape library control software such as 'stc'
(solaris based unfortunately) and 'juke', which is from one of the US
gov labs. I'd suspect that juke would be the way to go on the cheap.
Michael> 2) The system would take ~50 hours to do a backup. This is
Michael> too long, but we can't afford their bigger/faster systems. We
Michael> can live without full backups and work with incremental
Michael> schemes.
Since a DLT7000 should be able to conservatively backup 17Gb/hr (5Mb/s
* 3600 seconds), that's an aweful lot of data to move around. Are you
sure that you think you're going to have 850 Gb of data to save from
this cluster? If so... wow. On the other hand, it takes a good CPU
and SCSI sub-system to drive a DLT7000 at full streaming speed
consistently. And you have to feed the data fast to that sub-system
as well.
And if the data is important to you, make sure you keep it on disks
which are in a RAID set if possible, otherwise you're not going to be
very happy.
Michael> Does anyone know of any ADIC Linux drivers? I don't know
Michael> much; would they be brand specific? Would it be hard to write
Michael> a decent driver with ADIC's support?
It shouldn't be hard to take some existing work and port it to the
ADIC driver.
Michael> Does anyone know of an alternate DLT system that is supported
Michael> under Linux? I'm using RedHat 6.
Just about any DLT sub-system that can be run in simple stacker mode
should work find under Linux. It's more important to give the DLT7k
it's own SCSI bus and a good fast system that can push data through it
well.
John
John Stoffel - Senior Unix Systems Administrator - Ascend Communications
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.ascend.com - 978-952-7548
Geological time is not money. - Mark Twain
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