LTO4 Tape drive under Firestreamer?

The technical support forum for Firestreamer (the virtual tape library).
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cwhitmore
Posts: 15
Joined: 16 Aug 2011, 20:25

Post by cwhitmore »

I'm currenlty able to backup about half of my VMs onto a LTO4 tape which reaches 930GB then needs another one to finish. I already have compression enabled on the protection group. With Firestreamer I'm able to backup all nine of my VMs onto a 1.3TB SAN setup in FS as 200 tapes which takes up only 822GB for all nine VMs. Would it be possible to setup my physical LTO4 tape drive as a new FS library? If so, would the compression built into FS help with my LTO4 tape backups?
jsf
Cristalink Support
Posts: 300
Joined: 29 Aug 2010, 09:03

Post by jsf »

I am surprised and delighted to hear that the Firestreamer compression beats the hardware compression of a physical LTO4 tape drive.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to use Firestreamer to enhance compression for a physical tape drive. For that you would need a "filter driver" sitting between DPM and the tape drive. Such a driver would not normally make sense as the hardware compression is supposed to be better than software one.

Are you sure that the compression gets properly enabled on your physical drive? Is there any size difference between compressed and uncompressed data on a physical tape?
Best regards,
John Smith
Cristalink Support
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