Tape changer changed: Media house receives LTO equipment

Despite their incredible capacities, even tape changers reach their limits at some point for generational reasons. This was the case for a customer of CUNet GmbH. As a long-standing partner, the latter turned to Starline with confidence and received prompt support.

IT know-how provider CUNet GmbH, located north of Munich, needed new backup and archive capacity for its customer, a local media company. After all, the many video snippets and photos need to be stored appropriately and restored if necessary.

The initial situation was as follows:

Two large LTO-5 libraries with 6 drives and more than 100 slots stored the station's entire archive requirements. Two large JBODs with a capacity of several terabytes served as the necessary intermediate storage via D2D2T workflow.

This outdated configuration should be brought up to date. After all, not only are the uncut raw versions themselves already very memory-intensive, they have also become increasingly memory-hungry over the years due to higher resolution (4K/8K), contrast range (HDR) and simply due to a higher number of available streams.

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As LTO technology has made progress in both transfer rate and capacity with each generation, these improvements had to be adopted. In fact, LTO-9 offers an increase in data rate of almost three times that of LTO-5 (400 MB/s). In terms of capacity, the storage capacity of a single cartridge even increases by a factor of 12 to 18 terabytes.

_{(The figures given here relate to the native speed or capacity. With compressible data, the differences are even greater).}

So much for the theory: In practice, CUNet GmbH was dealing with the migration. An XL40 library from Overland was to be docked to the corresponding server together with a 24 bay JBOD via an Areca controller.

The same was to be accomplished for a second location with an 80-slot library, also from Overland, and an even larger JBOD. As both libraries were each equipped with two drives, the maximum transfer rate doubled to 800 MB/s. This was enough to perform the daily backups and the necessary archive tasks.

„As always, the cooperation with Starline went smoothly. As a long-standing partner, we are always happy to use their friendly service.”

Christian Dietrich, Managing Director

After delivery by Starline, the experts from CUNet completed the move within a few days. The installation of the Areca controllers and the installation of the system components in the respective data centers was completed quickly.

The automated copying of the LTO5 tapes, however, took the most time - as we all know, good things take time.

About CUNet

CUNet GmbH is a specialist for networks and IT systems. As an HP Preferred Partner, it meets the highest quality standards with the double advantage for its customers: Certified IT know-how at the highest level and provision of customer-specific solutions with fast processing by experts directly on site.

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LTO support with ARC-1886 RAID controllers

Areca controller from the ARC-1886 family with 8/16 ports, you can also control LTO tape drives in the future.

LTO also via Thunderbolt 3 thanks to Netstor

The NS722TB3 Thunderbolt desktop storage enclosure accepts any half-height internal LTO tape drive - SAS bridge included.

TrueNAS Storage Server Case Study with LTO Protection

A new server, a coherent backup solution and an emergency power supply will please photo and video professionals with high data volumes.

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Bernd Widmaier

Sales

Sales manager and expert in vertical markets and in Mac, video storage and media streaming.