The best secondary storage options
What are the best secondary storage options available?

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By secondary storage I assume you mean tape. There are several vendors to choose from and each has several options available. The best bet when choosing tape libraries is to talk to your preferred backup software vendor and see who they recommend. Backup is the "killer app" of SAN. Some libraries have the capability to directly connect into a fabric via fibre and others require an external data router which bridges fibre to SCSI. There are intelligent data routers available that include xcopy capability that enables "serverless" backup.

The next choice is whether to go with DLT or LTO. SuperDLT will enable backward compatibility with regular DLT tapes that may be of benefit for you. If you?re starting from a clean slate, then LTO today provides the fastest speeds. DLT will catch up very shortly though.

Chris

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This was first published in October 2001