How can I answer this question for you in this post?
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Written by Robert on May 15, 2008 – 2:35 am
I really cannot. You will know if you need new tape technology based on your due diligence. Nothing we can write here will tell you definitively that you should change your tape technology (unless, of course, you are using a QIC drive for your backup; in this case, we would feel safe recommending that you at least give it some thought). But even after you have done your due diligence, what if you have a system that cannot push the data any faster than the QIC drive can read? What if we said you should move off of those DLT 8000 drives and get into something faster without first looking at your server, NIC, or I/O to the drives?
This would, of course, be ridiculous, and anyone that claims they can tell you different may also have a bridge in backup utopia to sell you too. Do some investigating. Interview the vendors, asking them for real benchmark test results, for the native speeds of their drives, not the theoretical numbers. Always look for the disclaimer, ‘your mileage may vary’-another way of saying results are not typical. Take the time to perform the math calculations and see exactly what you are getting yourself into before you put your name on a proposal that carries a price tag of $1.2 million. Otherwise, you might find yourself surprised.
How to continue to meet the expectations of the business and finish your backups within the allotted time continues to stand before us. There are some very good alternatives to the traditional approach; most of what will be covered in this post has become more of the norm rather than the exception. In this post we briefly cover the other network solutions you might want to look into as your backup system needs to expand and keep up with the expectations of the business.
As we were evaluating our network looking for bottlenecks, we touched on the subject of moving up from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps, or even 1GbE (1000 Mbps). The benefit as you slide up the scale is more and more data being moved along the network pipe, and today most people have a switch in their environment for their large servers. If you don’t, that might be the first thing you place on the budget proposal for the next fiscal year.
There are several camps on this subject, but the rule of thumb we have always used has been the effective throughput of an Ethernet network is 1.25 MB/second for 10 Mbps, 12.5 MB/second for 100 Mbps, and 125 MB/sec for 1000 Mbps (1GbE), and even then, we tend to round those numbers down.
We know some people, ourselves included, who use these numbers and apply an overhead reduction to them of approximately 30 percent. It is a good baseline to start with while you are looking into the possibilities of uplifting your network to a higher-speed technology. You should be much better equipped to size or plan the deployment of your backup solution.
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