Performance times of your AER tape out?

We tape out about 250T every 3 months.  We run 6 tape drives (LTO4s) at the same time and it take about 2 weeks to fully finish.

I have seen the tape drive avg write speed around 60-75Mb/s most of the time.  Winch is pretty on par with what we got with commvault before moving to avamar.

Thanks for your feedback, sounds like it would be a sufficient rate for us.
Does it require much manual work for you in those 2 weeks? Or its fully automated for you?

Does anyone else have some performance data for their AER?

Thanks very much sconstable_illumina

bp134684,

It may be worth your while to review the attached pdf which provides a functionality comparison between ADMe versus AER.

If you cannot access it from here it can also be obtained @ https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-7910

Some questions you may want to ask yourself with respect to what a LTR solution should provide:

1. Does it provide a cataloged and fully indexed backup on tape where one can browse its logical contents

2. Does it support file granular recovery directly from tape without dependencies on Avamar or GSAN being present in the environment

3. Is the data on tape in its original format or some unintelligible proprietary format that requires additional processing when/if a tape recovery is needed

4. Can you share the tape application and its infrastructure from any of the major tape applications

6. Does it support migrating Avamar BU data directly to Cloud storage potentially eliminating the need for a tape application

ADMe is the only solution which can be answered with a YES to each of the above characteristics.

AER has a 100% dependency on the need for the MAN node being present for the duration of the lifecycle of your tapes.

AER tapes although they’re written using Networker are not compatible with it as the file format they write is in a proprietary format which must always be imported in their entirety back to an Avamar GSAN usually the MAN node before they’re intelligible.

If a single file is required for restore you must first decide which export you want to import without the convenience of a browse-able catalog and once imported determine whether the file your after is even present

in it and with the appropriate date etc. and if so you can now restore it to a client that has to be activated to the MAN nodes GSAN.

If you are still not convinced, ADMe also supports emulation of the AER file format but does so without the need for the MAN node.

You simply use a standard Linux server as the staging server and importing these archives can be to any Avamar system with sufficient GSAN capacity to ingest it.

regards,

Adam

Its is automated as long as we don't run out of tapes, the tape library we have will hold around 100 tapes, so sometime in the 2 week I have a re-stock tapes.  I hope to move the process to a larger library soon and it should make it fully automated at that point.