Up to 2TB support is free with the DSS-Lite product.

haven’t played with it recently, getting the Celerra in my production environment kind of negated the need for finding a third-party app.

I’ve had my share of crap solutions from most vendors. Can’t get any of it past the economics anaysis and that’s why they suck. Or, you get it in house and find out that the vendor’s consultants suck and you are stuck with crap that doesn’t work %100.

I built a 4 node, 2 cluster, replicated 12TB CAS solution for less than Netbackup licensing alone costs for 12TB.

USB or netboot. Commodity hardware. Pay one price for all features. A simple and elegant solution. Storing fixed content shouldn’t require a consulting gig and a huge budget. These guys invented Centerra and now they can do it right: http://www.caringo.com

Tape is great for bulk, makes sense for backing up our Celerras and active data, but it sucks for backing up our mail servers (90% of which is fixed content within .nsf files), and huge fixed content filesystems we can’t take down.

I just love the way a bad LTO drive can silently turn hundreds of LTO tapes into useless junk without telling you about it till it’s too late.

Want a wake up call? Get a unit that reads the CM chip counters in your LTO3 cartridges. Have plenty of antacid on hand when you do.

We are sending this stuff to CAS. Let the CAS take care of the data integrity (which my tape doesn’t)and rep it around the world to handle regional disasters. I don’t want to worry about being able to restore every last thing from crappy tape.

Give these guys some business because they have a good technical solution that doesn’t suck and we need more guys like this out there…
They’ll give you something like 4TB for free to play
with.

I need to back off the coffee…

And backed up. Active data should be backed up regularly to fit whatever RPO you’ve promised your users. The problem with backup is that it doesn’t support an RPO of zero in the event of corruption. Best you could hope for is a 15 minute snap on your production data and the ability to detect corruption within your snap window.

Though I’m finding myself intrigued by the supposed ability of EMC’s new RecoverPoint appliance to allow a DVR style roll-back to a point in time. I’ve not seen it actually happen yet, but I’m told it’s pretty slick.

Not being a big fan of appliances in any form, more moving parts to break, more latency, etc. But I’m interested in this one.

Sven Neirynck

Personally, I feel like centera is an evil POS, but I will agree that disk can be a good archive target…Providing you can get your data off at some point in the future when you realize that you’re backed into the proverbial vendor locked in corner…Like Centera–which is certainly neither inexpensive or cheap to support. It’s roughly the cost of hitachi frame capacity, it’s hard to ever get data off without paying for “migration services”, and it’s freaking always throwing errors.