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waszkiewicz
Asked: 2011-02-10 07:06:29 +0800 CST

What are the benefits of using 2 LTO-5 in parallel for pure CIFS backup?

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I use a NetApp FAS3240 as a storage system, and I'd like to attach an LTO-5 NDMP backup system (with Backbone) in Fiber Channel. What will be the difference of using 1 LTO-5 or 2 LTO-5 streams? Will it improve performance a lot? Is there any kind of LTO-5 technical database with some information?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

EDIT: The amount of data could reach 30TB per backup job, no tape backup used yet.

backup tape ndmp

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Well, the benefit would be speed if you can keep both drives spinning from the NDMP streams.

    I don't think your storage system can split one job into 2 concurrent NDMP streams so each NDMP stream would be a separate job.

    The possible downside would be having to manage 2 tapes for your data, 2 tapes to restore from, 2 big, expensive tapes for data that (might) fit on 1 tape, etc. (This may not be an actual downside for you, depending on what you are trying to achieve.)

    How much data are you backing up and how long does it take to back it up to one drive?

    (multiple drives is often useful with longer backup jobs so that you have a drive available for restores while a long job is running and/or so shorter jobs don't pile up waiting for the long job to finish)

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