HP 3000 sites looking for the fastest possible backup are also finding the most recent choice is the most reliable, as Digital Linear Tape (DLT) units get popular in shops with a big appetite for backup. Now backup software from several sources is making these DLT4000 and DLT7000 units candidates for library use, where unattended and robotic backups happen within the DLT unit.

DLTs come in various flavors: single devices which can deal only with a single tape at a time before operator intervention is needed, up to libraries, which can deal with multiple tapes to either single or multiple drives without operator intervention. DLTs which can act as libraries are offered as autochangers — which simply move sequentially through a series of tapes stacked into a loader — or robotic libraries, which can choose tapes randomly and load them into a transport.

HP began supporting the latest DLT7000s with MPE/iX 5.5 PowerPatch 6 and MPE/iX 6.0. Customers report transfer rates three times greater than DDS-3 speeds, and well beyond DLT4000s. The devices’ reliability is also far better than DDS-1 and DDS-2 tape drives, whose heads go out of alignment periodically and make tapes unreadable.

“I do not trust DDS-1 at all,” said VP of Technology Mark Klein at ORBiT Software (800.896.7248). “I’m more comfortable with DDS-3, but at ORBiT, I still periodically backup to our DLT7000 as well. On average, I’ll create a DLT every one to two weeks. The balance of the backups are to DDS-3.”

Jukeboxes which hold stacks of DLT tapes are available, supported by third party backup software from ORBiT and Hi-Comp America (281.288.7438). Each DLT7000 requires a dedicated F/W SCSI card, so HP 3000 CPU slots can be scarce; list prices are in the range of $25,000 for a standalone drive and card.

ORBiT was the first to provide DLT support on the HP 3000 and began selling DLT4000s before HP had their own device. ORBiT supports both the DLT4000 and the DLT7000 today on both MPE/iX 5.5 and 6.0.

The company recently performed a gigabyte-per-minute benchmark to a single DLT unit at HP, using a Series 989/600 to a single DLT7000. “This data was one of HP’s standard benchmark databases, and the data was highly compressible,” said Klein, “so your mileage may vary. Aggregate throughput should increase as tape drives are added to the mix.”

The ORBiT test was performed only with an HP 3000, using no additional foreign hardware nor software. “We were able to keep the DLT7000 in streaming mode and the writes were queueing, so it appears that the limiting factor is still the target device and not our backup engine,” Klein said.

ORBiT is also readying a Library Manager for its backup solutions, an area where Hi-Comp is already offering software to control tape units. Library support comes in several flavors, from when the customer wants to do certain unattended operations such as backing up their systems, to others who want many random, tape-based unattended operations. “The user in the first category doesn’t really need “library support,” Klein said, “even if they’re asking for it. What they really want is autochanger support, the ability to automatically mount tapes in a predefined order. This can be handled today by all of [our] backup products, because that is a functionality of the device, not the software.”

The second library goal requires software support. Hi-Comp’s Denys Beauchemin said the company’s new library manager gives HP 3000 sites a way to use the HIBACK-TX product for library backups without any non-3000 systems in the loop.

“Hiback uses the module HIJACC (Hiback Jukebox Access and Control) to handle the robotics,” Beauchemin said. The software solution means that HIBACK users no longer need anything but a library, an HP 3000, and HIBACK-TX with HIJACC. Libraries are more costly than standalone DLT units, but a typical one might cost about $50,000, according to Beauchemin. A Series 979 HIBACK-TX license would be $5,330, plus the cost of HIJACC for up to 65 slots at $3,500.

The new HIBACK solution can work in all-3000 shops, but it’s designed to interoperate with multiple environments, “controlling the device and acting as a server for other nodes on other platforms,” Beauchemin said. In such an arrangement an HP 7448 DLT autoloader with four drives and 48 slots could be connected to an HP 3000.

“The device might have three drives connected to the 3000 along with the robotics control, and have the fourth drive connected to an NT Server,” he added. “The 3000 could back up to three drives simultaneously while the fourth is being used by the NT server. The MPE box, of course, is able to act as a backup server to the enterprise and receive backups over the network from MPE, UNIX, NT, Novell and Linux.”

HP has announced it will not support DLT4000 and DLT7000 units for the uses of BOOT, FCOPY and STORE, instructing its customers to use the Legato Networker Storage Node. But other third-party companies support these units for those uses, explained ORBiT’s Klein.