Choosing a Tape Drive

Tape drives are still the main technology used by organizations for backup and archiving. But the amount of tape drives on the market may take a choice of tape drive a complex task. How to choose a tape drive that meets their needs, without blowing your budget? The following are some of the most important factors to consider. 1. Choose a capacity of tape drive that has sufficient capacity to store backup copies. Tape drives are able to compress data so that it can adapt more data on the tape, which is why manufacturers specify both a native capacity and capability of compressed, usually with a reduction of 2 1. However, highly compressed files such as video and audio formats are not kompressibelt at all. For this reason, it does not have the capacity compressed into account when selecting a tape drive. A good way to determine the size of the backup job after compression is the study of records from the last backup. If they are not available, it can be assumed that the data can be compressed at a ratio of 1.4:1, unless the hard drive contains a large number of highly compressed files. 2. Transmission rate data tape drive are important when there is little window of opportunity in the backup jobs that can operate. It is often advisable to make backups during the night when the network is at its lowest point. Select a tape drive that is able to complete a backup job in your window of opportunity. For example, to save 400 per night, which require a transfer rate of about 30GB/hour. A little known fact about tape drives is that the data is delivered to consumers at a price sufficient to maintain the flow, or suffer from the tape start-stop motion. This proposal was seriously degrade the life of the device and backup tapes and reliable. There are two reasons why the usual tape drive should not be provided with data at a rate sufficient. First, the speed at which data is read from disk to the server is not enough. This rate depends on the size and location of files on disk and is generally unpredictable, but it can be determined using specialized software. Secondly, if the data are transmitted via a computer network to a backup server, the network can not provide data at a rate sufficient. The best performance of a network is predictable and easy to measure, on the basis of past performance in the network. Consider a network using 10BaseT Ethernet. This transfer through this type of network can not exceed 10 Mb / s, it is immediately clear that a tape drive that requires 20 MB / s is inappropriate. 3. The reliability and duty cycle A simple way to measure the reliability of a tape drive is to find the average time between failure (MTBF) as specified by the manufacturer. You should remember, but the MTBF is in a given cycle. For example, consider a Travan tape drive with a MTBF of 370,000 hours at 20% duty cycle. The device has only an average of 370,000 hours between failures, if carried out less than 20% of the time (about 4.8 hours per day), and management of tape drive to further reduce significantly the reliability of the device. 4. No price for the purchase of more high-end tape drive if it is simply too expensive. Consider how the value of the tape drive will give you. Are you willing to pay more for more performance? Or is it necessary to sacrifice performance to save on costs? If you choose wisely, you should with a tape drive that body http://www.backupassist.com/news/tape-backup.html tape backup and archiving needs without blowing the budget. Linus Chang is an expert backup and the charge of Assist Development Backup - http://www.backupassist.com software links that are simple and affordable, and perfect for small and medium enterprises. Protect your Windows servers, including SQL Server and Exchange Server, to tape, REV drive, hard drives, NAS and more, at a fraction of the cost of second http://www.backupassist.com/news/tape-backup software . html backup software.