Admin Alert: Change Your Tape Drives, Change Your Tape Management Costs

One shop I work with went through a tape drive revolution with two recent hardware purchases. They went from using several different tape drive formats to using one higher speed backup format for all locations. Here’s what they found out from the experience, and how a simple tape drive upgrade helped them lower their operational tape management costs.

Before the Upgrade

In late 2007, a mishmash of tape drive styles dominated this shop’s backup capabilities in the company’s data center. One System i 520 machine with two partitions (production and development) used two Ultrium LTO tape drives to back up its data. The production partition backed up its data to an Ultrium LTO 2 unit, while the development side used a breadbox style LTO unit. System and daily backups generally used two to four tapes per backup.

A System i 550 machine (which also contained a production and a development partition) used even more primitive backup technology: twin IBM 3590 tape drives with 10 tape autoloaders. The company used six tapes whenever it performed a full system backup on either partition.

Two years ago, the company brought in a third System i 550 machine that was configured as a Capacity BackUp (CBU) machine for one of the production partitions. This machine had an IBM TS3200 Tape Library unit with one IBM Ultrium 3 tape drive in its chassis, so the tape drive was dedicated to backing up the CBU. If the company needed to restore information from the CBU’s Ultrium 3 backup tapes to its companion production machine, it would disconnect the fiber CBU-to-Ultrium drive connection and connect the production partition to the Ultrium drive for restoration. A full system CBU backup fit on one Ultrium 3 tape.

The shop was utilizing five different tape units with four different tape formats. Because three of the formats (LTO, LTO 2, and 3590 cartridges) used multiple tapes for their backups and because the tapes were stored off-site, they sent tapes out to an information management company in one medium storage container every day. The vendor stored 51 different containers for the company each month.

To make matters worse, the CBU was scheduled to be housed off-site so the shop was losing its ability to move information between the CBU and the production partition by using the Ultrium 3 drive.

Building on Newer Technology

The solution to the mess was tape drive standardization. The shop decided to buy a second IBM TS3200 Tape Library configured with two Ultrium 3 tape drives in its chassis. Although it was tempting to go with the newer Ultrium 4 drives in the TS3200, the company decided to stay with Ultrium 3 drives to maintain compatibility with the existing tape drive (they also got a good deal). In addition, the shop decided to buy an IBM Brocade 200E fiber switch with 16 ports, so that they could share the two Ultrium 3 drives between their various production and development partitions.

With this configuration, the i5/OS administrator could standardize their tape drive setup and reduce tape handling costs. Here’s how they did it.

• The original TS3200 backup unit went off-site to the remote location with the CBU box.
• The company used fiber cable to connect the two tape drives in the new TS3200 to the new IBM Brocade switch, so that the drives could be shared by any device that was also hooked up to the Brocade switch.
• Each System i partition was also connected to the IBM Brocade switch through fiber cable, so that it could use either of the two tape drives in the TS3200 (which were also connected to the switch). They configured each System i machine, one i5/OS production and one i5/OS development partition, to share one of the two Ultrium 3 tape drives in the TS3200. With some programming, a schedule was worked out so that no two partitions would attempt to use the same Ultrium 3 drive at the same time.
• Because all five partitions were now set up to use Ultrium 3 tape drives, the shop was able to stop using the two old IBM 3590 tape drives and the two LTO tape drives for daily and weekly production backups. Even though the old drives were no longer being used, the shop maintained the existing connections between their partitions and the four old tape drives, in case they needed to restore data from the older backup units. They turned off all four drives when not in use (which was most of the time).

Buying a TS3200 with two Ultrium 3 drives and an IBM Brocade switch turned out to be a great move that helped the shop lower its tape management costs. By investing in new capital equipment, the shop was able to realize the following yearly operational costs and benefits.

• Faster backups on fewer tapes–After converting to Ultrium 3 tapes, each partition used one to two Ultrium 3 tapes for their backups. With the older drives, the company used two to six tapes for backups on each partition, especially when backing up to the IBM 3590 tape drives. The shop was able to reduce its operations supply budget because it needed to purchase fewer tapes each month (although it should be mentioned that at start-up, the initial cost for tapes went up because all the tapes in the weekly and monthly rotation had to be replaced). The new tape drives also backed up data faster, which provided additional up-time for the production partitions.
• Easier to move information between systems and partitions–When each partition uses the same tape drive format, it’s not a big deal to rebuild a development partition with production data or to restore information from a CBU tape back to its corresponding production partition. Because production and CBU boxes were finally able to use the same tapes, the shop substituted CBU backups for its production system backups, which allowed the production partition to be available for near 24x7x365 capability.
• Fewer tapes stored off-site–The company had a contract with an information management vendor to store i5/OS tapes off-site in one medium-sized storage container each day. When the number of tapes was reduced, the company was able to change the contract to use individual slotted tape storage instead of container storage. Slotted individual storage generally stores more tapes in a smaller area than container storage. Since the company was now using fewer tapes and those tapes took up less space at the tape management facility, their monthly tape management costs went down after they cycled out the old storage containers.
• Reduced maintenance costs on tape drives–By replacing four tape drives with one TS3200 unit, the shop was able to reduce its maintenance costs. It dropped maintenance on the now-unused 3590 tape drives and the Ultrium LTO and LTO2 drives. However, it kept the drives around in case old data needed to be restored to one of the partitions.

The end result is that for a one-time capital request, the shop was able to:

• Reduce its operational costs in yearly tape purchases
• Provide tape compatibility between machines
• Slash the company’s off-site storage costs
• Lower tape drive management costs

One final note: even though I discussed achieving these results with IBM equipment, this story is not meant to be an implicit endorsement to only use IBM products. All of the benefits described here can be realized with any number of products on the market. The moral is that if you’re thinking of standardizing your tape drive format, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that it may create a number of ripple-effect benefits for your shop and for your company, if you just set up your configurations correctly.

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