General backup system

I would recommend reviewing my backup comment - it started as a comment on another site and grew into a long discussion of how to run backups (note: it does not give specifics on software, but it says that in the beginning):

Comment aside, No tape technology comes with it's own backup software unless it happens to be a bundle offered by someone.

You might be better off moving to an SDLT system in part because SDLT is supposed to be able to read your old DLT tapes if you have to restore them.

Another options for reducing your backup window is multiple jobs with multiple schedules. For example, if you have multiple partitions or servers, do a full of one on Monday night, another on Tuesday, and another on Wednesday. On the same nights, run differentials on the ones not being fully backed up. Assuming the data were evenly spread (not likely) you could then have 3 days with 6 hour backups instead of one day with 18 hour backups.

I would also look over your hardware and drivers. Perhaps get a different SCSI card and/or tape drive. It sounds like your throughput is about 4.7 MB/Second... While actual performance DOES vary, especially based on what you are backing up, the SCSI spec likely used on that drive provides for 8x faster throughput... so why is it slow? It could be due to you backing up many small files, it could be due to the disk subsystem the data is stored on, or it could be due to the tape drive - before you buy something else, you need to figure out where your bottleneck is... or you could end up with a new system that shows no improvement.

I'm doing something similar so here are some of my thoughts questions:

We backup 800gb roughly, on any given full backup. Currently we use internal Sata drives for each of our 4 servers.. with external sets of 2 drives for each servers offsite backup.

My new idea is storage server with 2003 Storage server R2.
Ill list the specs at the very end.

Keeping this short:

I tried simulating this on an existing Pentium D sataII server (as a HDD server for now, tape addon later).

Typically I think you need BackupExec for tapes.. Ntbackup wont recognize tape libraries..

here is the tape unit we are probably going with later in the year:

Its an LTO3 unit, with a full size LTO3 drive.. it supposidly will support dual LTO3 later on, but you end up having to buy two LTO3 drives, instead of just adding one more. ~$4200

I wasnt aware they had come out with any LTO4 units as of yet?

I also was considering this DLT-S4 400/800 type device $4700?

It was more money, didnt have the ability for 2 drives at once either.

Although, by the time you replace both LTO3s in the other unit to get dual drives, you could easily get an DLT-S4 unit. Though i think one driving reason for getting the LTO3, was it may be upgradable to LTO4 (which would have faster throughput).

I had horrific backup times with Symantec BackupExec over the network (around 16 hours for 772GB of data at 880 MB/min rate, with no verify, verify added 6 hours).

My network backup of a single server with Acronis (d drive, 332gb) took 9 hours the first time.. but i read about this network share cache pollution issue in windows (i dont know much more than this).. they recommended changing the backup size max at a 50gb split.. then the backup across the lan took 4hr 40 minutes, very similar to my Acronis locally of about 4hr 20 minutes (around 20 MB/sec). Doing this split with BE didnt help its problems.. so I will probably not be using BE unless for tapes.

So here are my specs on my forthcoming server, I'm guessing this should be a decent performer over my existing test server which was a Pentium D 2.8ghz with 2gb ram (sataII in raid5).

I'm debating trying raid6 over raid5, i dont have the space to do raid01 in the new server (8 bays, 2 of them OS mirror).. will be a 2.2TB array of 5 drives (seagate ES style, is the ES really needed for a backup server?):

Server rack device: Supermicro 2U SC825TQ-560LP (only supports low profile cards)

Motherboard: Asus DSBV-D (PCIe x8)

EDIT: actually I'm not sure if this motherboard will work with the supermicro, I may have to go with this one instead, which they recommended:
and this for the storage controller:

Low profile 3ware PCIex4: 9650SE-8LPML
I cant seem to find PCIe x8 controller boards to match the max speed of the motherboard recommended for this server rack device.

As a side note.. the CPU will be woodcrest 2.0 5130 with 2GB of ddr2 667mhz ram.
The harddrives will be SATAII in a 2.2TB array (5 drives of 500gb each).. Seagate ES ST3500630NS type drives

Ram will be this ram: now decided on 4gb total.