Get The Most Out Of Your LTO4

Earlier this year, IBM debuted new LTO 4 hardware

These units incorporate the latest generation of advanced Linear Tape-Open^TM (LTO) technology, and are suited for handling the backup, save and restore, and archival data storage needs of a wide range of small systems as single drives. Or when configured into libraries, LTO 4 can handle enterprise sized data storage requirements.

But without the right knowledge, you might not be achieving the increased performance capable with the LTO 4. In a nutshell, the SCSI bus can’t keep up with how fast the tape drive is going. Even an Ultra 320 SCSI interface can’t match the performance of LTO 4.

Cautionary Tale

We recently had a customer who had been using LTO 2 on a SCSI LVD interface, and he was running out of backup window due to the write speed of LTO 2. They upgraded the tape drive to LTO 4 which on paper is 3.4 times faster, and expected to reduce the size of their backup window by at least one half.

In fact what happened was the LTO 4 took longer to complete the backup.

Here’s what was happening:

• The data was streamed to the drive and filled the buffer.
• The drive would write the data and the host could not keep the buffer full. So the tape drive would stop and wait for data.
• Once the buffer was full again the tape drive would back hitch the tape and start writing again.
• This would continue to happen through the entire backup.

The stopping and starting and back hitching was adding extra time to the backup with the LTO 4 instead of performing the continuous write to the tape the LTO 2 was able to do.

The Good News

Fortunately, there is a solution to this issue - purchase a Fibre Channel attached drive.

Talk to us on 1800 777 111 if you’re not getting the performance you think you should from your equipment.