Linux Tape Device Emulation?

Mon Jan 16 16:03:24 PST 2006

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Jim,

Oddly enough, we have the same exact solution from what I've heard,  
the Mirapoint! Small world.

I'm always a bit hesitant to purchase used gear, especially when it  
comes to tapes (given the moving parts). Ideally,
I'd just hook an lto-3 onto it, and take advantage of the speed  
(576gb/hour), which meant if I was at full capacity (100gb)
a full backup or restore should be around 20 minutes, which has it's  
appeal.. and around a $7k pricetag (for which I
could build two very redundant file servers as dedicated backup  
servers, and have enough $$ to take my wife out to
dinner at French Laundry).

On the other hand.. lto-1 drives have the capacity I need, and a good  
pricepoint .. around $1k it seems.  What do the datadomain
boxes look like pricewise?

Michael T. Halligan
- -------------------------------------
BitPusher, LLC
http://www.bitpusher.com/

On Jan 16, 2006, at 2:56 PM, Jim Hickstein wrote:

>> Specifically, what I'm looking for, is a method to interface a  
>> volume, or block device, as a tape, so that I can
>> then have remote devices read/write to that volume as a RMT  
>> (remote magnetic tape) device.  I have a mail
>> system that only supports local tape, RMT or NDMP for backups...  
>> NDMP is way out of my budget right now (lowest cost
>> software I've found that does ndmp reliably is almost as much as  
>> the mail system cost.. about $20k), and I'd rather
>> not buy a tape drive right now, if I could avoid it.
>
> Sounds familiar.  I bought a tape drive, but used, and for cheap.  
> (LTO-1 is at the right point on the price curve, and holds all I  
> need on a single volume -- for now.)  RMT also works for me, but  
> use large blocksize writes to keep things moving.
>
> If there is any more money (which there might not be), talk to my  
> friend Rex Walters at www.datadomain.com.  Their product addresses  
> this, in general.  It's a box of disks, but does very good  
> compression based on the assumption of sequential access, and dumps  
> not being entirely novel from one day to the next.

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