New backup hardware

Friday represented the first production use of our new LTO4-based tape library. This replaced the old SDLT320 based Scalar 100 we've had for entirely too long. The simple fact that all of the media and drives are BRAND NEW should make our completion rate go very close to 100%. This excites me.

Friday we did a backup of our main file-serving cluster and the Blackboard content volume in a single job that streamed to a single tape drive.

Total data backed up: 6.41TB
Total time: 1475 minutes
Speed: 4669 MB/Min, or 77 MB/s

Still not flank speed for LTO4 (that's closer to 120 MB/s) but still markedly faster than the SDLT stuff we had been doing. The similar backup on the Scalar 100 took around 36 hours (2160 minutes) instead of the 24ish hours this one took, and it used 4 tape drives to do it.

Ahhhh, modern technology, how I've desired you.

*pets it*

Now to resist taking a fire ax to the old library. We have to surplus it through official channels, and they won't take it if it has been "obviously defaced". Ah well.