interfacing an LTO-7 tape drive

[aag]

I am planning to purchase an HPE LTO-7 Ultrium 15000 SAS external tape drive. It has a SAS 2.0 interface.

My question is: which controller board should I purchase for the workstation attached to the tape drive? I need to back up many terabytes of data, hence the interface should have the largest possible bandwidth.

Any advice shall be greatly appreciated!

 

[vanfawx]

A LSI 9200-8e or similar (Like the Dell H200E) would work fine for you. The LSI 9200-8e and Dell H200E are both SAS2 HBA's. The limiting factor is the SAS2 interface of the tape drive, so there's no point using anything faster.

 

[aag]

Many thanks - I will go for the interface that you have advised. My next question is: which software would you advise me to buy? I need to archive very large files, >300 GByte each.

 

[Evan]

Many thanks - I will go for the interface that you have advised. My next question is: which software would you advise me to buy? I need to archive very large files, >300 GByte each.

Do you need versioning or want just to get a copy on tape ?
Free would LTFS where you just treat it as a filesystem, works of for large files on a very quick test I did.

What platform ? Linux / Windows / Unix / BSD / MacOS ? Various option in the OS’s generally also.

 

[aag]

It's a Windows workstation used to acquire huge stacks of microscopy images. I have never used a tape backup before, but the sheer size of the data forces me to do that.

I'd be prepared to spend up to $1500 for a stable, trustworthy and well-designed backup software.

I have Acronis Backup on another windows machine (Server 2016) as a disk-to-disk backup. It is intuitive and reliable - but the backup recovery is irritatingly slow. I understand that "Acronis Backup Advanced" does tape. I am expecting that tape will be much slower than disk-to-disk, right?

 

[Evan]

do you want the backup software to tell you what’s on each tape or your happy to keep your own list ? If the latter maybe free options if the former you need certainly some proper backup software.

With large files of in the order of gb’s then being sequential data tape is pretty fast, to use the files it’s best off disk but to get them on and off the tape to and from disk will be ok speed wise. The issue can be is your disk fast enough to keep up with the tape ! (Sequential)

Bacula.org is free open source backup that may be enough for what you need.

 

[Rand__]

I settled on Iperius in the end. Unfortunately they don't offer disk-2-disk-2-tape yet but they are working on it, so I set up remote to local SSD, local SSD to tape chained backups.
Make sure you have ample network or local disk speed so that you can actually use the SAS2 interface