I am currently assembling a quote for an LTO-4 tape backup system. So far, I am looking at using a 16-slot Quantum SuperLoader 3 with LTO-4HH drive as the tape unit. Married to this will be a server to act as the backup server that will drive the tape unit using Bacula to manage backups. The server will be a quad core X3440 system with 4 GB of RAM and four 1 TB SATA 7200 rpm hard drives in a case that has room for eight hot-swap drives. I plan on using FreeBSD 8 on the system, using ZFS to raidz the drives together to provide spool space for Bacula. I will be using an Areca ARC-1300-4X PCIe SAS card to interface with the tape drive.
My main question is this: is the Quantum SuperLoader 3 LTO-4 tape drive supported by Bacula 5 on FreeBSD? In particular, is the autoloader fully supported? The Bacula documentation indicates the SuperLoader works fully under Bacula, though not explicitly whether under FreeBSD. The backup server will serve a GigE network cluster of perhaps a dozen machines with over 6 TB of storage, most of which is on the cluster's NFS server. Does anyone have good advice on sizing the spool/holding/disk pool for a Bacula server? Is it imperative to have enough disk space to hold a full backup (i.e., 6 TB in this case), or is it sufficient to have enough space to maintain streaming to tape? (I don't have much experience of Bacula, having used it only to back up to disk.) In other words, do I need more 1 TB drives in my backup server? Finally, is 4 GB of RAM sufficient for good performance with ZFS? Will ZFS on FreeBSD be able to maintain full streaming speeds to tape, given the various reports of I/O stalls under ZFS reported recently? Thanks in advance for any advice or information. Cheers, Paul. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
