Vendors Announce New Tape Backup Records

Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI), along with Brocade, LEGATO Systems, LSI Logic, and StorageTek, have announced new tape backup benchmarks that far exceed previous benchmarks. The companies' products achieved a rate of 10.1TB per hour for disk-to-tape file backup. They also set a record for image restoration at 7.9TB per hour. The new benchmarks triple the previous record of 3.6TB per hour for backup, which Hewlett-Packard (HP) set in April, and 2.2TB per hour for restoration, which Computer Associates (CA) set in October 2002. SGI claims the new benchmarks are actual, not extrapolated, and are repeatable.

   Other benchmarks that the companies achieved and announced include file-level backup at a sustained rate of 10.1TB per hour; file-level restoration at a sustained rate of 4.5TB per hour; image-level backup at a sustained rate of 7.2TB per hour; image-level restoration at a sustained rate of 7.9TB per hour; file-level backup of 1TB in 7:09 minutes; file-level restoration of 1TB in 15:29 minutes; and a single 10TB XFS file system file-level backup at a sustained rate of 6.26TB per hour and restoration at a sustained rate of 4.43TB per hour. The components used in the benchmarks include the SGI Origin 3000 server and SGI Total Performance 9500 (TP9500) RAID storage arrays (based on technology that LSI Logic developed), Brocade's SilkWorm 2Gb Fibre Channel switches, StorageTek's PowderHorn 9310 library using T9940B tape drives, and Legato's new NetWorker 7.0 backup software. The cost of the total configuration is about $3 million. All the components are currently available.

   http://www.sgi.com

   http://www.brocade.com

   http://www.legato.com

   http://www.lsilogic.com

   http://www.storagetek.com