…from the storage to the server …over the LAN or SAN …and finally to the backup device
High-end tape libraries are often underutilized due to limited LAN bandwidth
Larger backup and restore windows mean more downtime and more complex planning
Server with DAS
Backup server
SCSI-attached tape library Backup client
SAN storage
Our traditional backup model was about copying the data over the Local Area Network.
When all the storage was internal or Direct Attached, we had a backup server, a media server, the tape was normally connected to the backup server, the backup client would sit on the LAN and we would actually copy all the data over the Local Area Network.
If we are a 9-5 operation and the LAN sits idle overnight this works quite well. Even when we first started going to SANs and started storage consolidation, we still kept the same backup model a lot of the time. The backup client would read the data off the SAN Attached Storage, copy the data over the Local Area Network and it would get written to tape but the media server could create a tape index, the catalogue would be stored on the backup server, (so if we wanted to do a file restore we could fast forward the tape and do the individual file restore off the tape), but there was time to recover the data.