Certance's CP 3100 D2D2T

Backup and Archive

I plugged the CP 3100 into my server and fired up my Veritas Backup Exec software. It saw the CP 3100 as a DAT autoloader with 25 tape slots and a single tape drive. And as soon as I started a backup, Backup Exec saw a "tape" loaded into the drive and sent its data to this virtual tape. Once the backup is complete, the CP 3100 will archive the data automatically by copying it to a DAT tape. If a blank tape or the tape you last archived to this virtual slot isn't in the drive, CP 3100 will queue the archive task and ask you about it over e-mail. You can back up and restore to other virtual tapes while archiving is in progress, and the CP 3100 won't overwrite data until it has been archived to tape.

To conserve space, the CP 3100 allocates disk space to virtual tapes as data is written to them. So a 20-GB virtual tape with 100 MB of data, for example, uses only 100 MB of disk space--an intelligent design that some enterprise vendors would do well to emulate.

The CP 3100 is managed from a built-in Web server, which needs some fine-tuning from Certance. From here you can erase tapes or direct the CP 3100 not to archive some virtual tape slots. This comes in handy if, for instance, you want to make full backups to both disk and tape to be sent off-site but prefer your incremental backups only to disk--perfect for SMBs that make full backups over the weekend and incremental backups nightly.

The CP 3100 can be set up so Slots 1 to 5 keep the data on disk and don't autoarchive to tape (for the nightly backups), while Slots 6 to 25 automatically archive to tape (for the weekly backups).Unfortunately, you can't manipulate the task queue to cancel an archive or move an important tape up in the queue. But commands to erase a tape do go directly to the top of the queue, so you don't get stuck in the catch-22 of only having tapes with obsolete data.

Making Good

In my tests, the CP 3100 delivered on its promise. Backups were three to five times faster than to a DDS4 tape drive, and most important, small restores took seconds, whether the file was at the beginning or the end of the backup set.

Certance has promised updates to improve the Web interface and add support for any application that supports a DAT autoloader and iSCSI support, which should make the CP 3100 more attractive to many IT staffs.

Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist at Networks Are Our Lives, a network design and consulting firm in Hoboken, N.J. Write to him at [email protected].0