The Four Hundred--Software Must Catch Up to Hardware for Multiplatform Tape Backups

Companies today have the capability to run their nightly backups for multiple servers on a single tape drive or library, bringing them economic savings through hardware consolidation. Midrange tape vendors eStorage and GST, which have concentrated on serving OS/400 shops, are two of the latest to roll-out multiplatform support with their tape offerings. But when it comes to using a single piece of software to manage backups and recoveries for multiple platforms, OS/400 still presents difficulties, mandating a best-of-breed approach.

eStorage's first offering for the multiplatform tape market is its 4575 series of automated tape libraries, which are manufactured by Qualstar and can be fitted with either AIT tape drives from Sony or LTO tape drives manufactured by IBM. The 4575 can be fitted with up to 12 AIT drives or up to 8 LTO drives which connect to the host via HVD or LVD SCSI interfaces or 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel links. Pricing starts at $18,400 for a library with two AIT drives.

Up to this point, the 4575 had been limited to supporting AS/400 and iSeries servers. This month, the Irvine, California, company is selling an updated version of the 4575 that supports Windows 2000, Unix, and Linux in addition to OS/400. "More and more of our iSeries and AS/400 customers also have Windows or Unix systems," says John Gimpl, eStorage's executive vice president. "Our 4575 tape library now lets our customers easily and economically leverage a single set of tape resources across all of their systems, regardless of the manufacturer."

Lake Forest, California-based GST has also widened its offerings. The company has been a IBM eServer focused shop since it launched earlier this year with a line of AIT and LTO drives, autoloaders, and libraries that support iSeries, xSeries, and pSeries servers (it also offers an entry-level SLR drive for OS/400 shops). In the next month or so, the company is expected to formally announce expansion beyond the IBM realm, into the open systems area as a whole. In fact, about half of GST's tape drive sales are already occurring outside of the IBM arena, to companies running servers from Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and others, such as SGI. (Editors note: Guild Companies itself uses an AIT-2 tape drive from GST with its HP ProLiant servers, which run Windows 2000 and Linux 2.4. It just plugged in and worked.)

"We came out of the shoot as an eServer shop," says David Breisacher, chairman and CEO of GST. "Based on the response and demand we got, we've rapidly opened the channel as how we sell our products." GST has adapted its tape subsystems to connect to each of the supported operating systems the company will be announcing support for. In most cases in the open systems world, the changes GST must make to the firmware and supporting hardware should not be considered major, Breisacher says, although each operating system does present its own peculiarities.

In the open systems world, Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system presents the biggest challenge to connect a tape drive to, Breisacher says. But any hurdle that a Sun server presents pales in comparison to the complexities and anomalies of the OS/400 server, Breisacher says. "The most complex, the most confusing platform, which requires the most effort, is the iSeries, and we've got that mastered," he says.

Companies that are looking to standardize and consolidate on a single tape platform for their OS/400 and open system servers (Windows, Linux, and Unix) can do so with today's SCSI-to-Fibre Channel SAN matrix switches, Breisacher says. As far as supporting multiple platforms--including OS/400--simultaneously on a single tape drive, autoloader, or library instance, the technology is there, he says. But that's as far as it goes.

"It's hardware sharing, not software sharing. The AS/400 is still in its own island," Breisacher says. "There's a lot of talk about cross platform backups, one platform that can back up all hosts. [IBM's systems management group] Tivoli said they could do it. The technology is there, but in terms of performance, they can't do it." That performance limitation stems from trying to do backups over a 10/100 Mbps LAN connection, which creates a serious bottleneck.

Despite IBM's vision of utility computing, e-business on demand, and autonomic systems that are self-healing, when it comes to that most basic and rudimentary of computer operations--the all-important tape backup--a best-of-breed software approach is still recommended when OS/400 servers share data center space with Windows, Unix, and Linux servers. On the open systems side, Veritas, Computer Associates, and Tivoli are the big players. For OS/400, the players are LXI, Help/Systems, and IBM, which includes the BRMS backup and recovery software as part of the Enterprise Edition of OS/400.

The disconnect between the OS/400 and open systems side of the backup software racket has always been around, but it has never been more glaring. "There is still an 'us and them' mentality, there is still a chasm," says Tim Kormos, a product manager with Irving, Texas-based LXI. "There absolutely is a need to bridge the gap. I can't tell you number of times a week I get a call from a customer who wants to integrate their iSeries systems with their open systems."

LXI, which sells the MMS for iSeries suite of backup, recovery, and vault management software, has several projects in the works to try to help customers bridge that gap. One project that Kormos would talk about is an as-yet unannounced LXI product called the Universal Client that will allow companies to run their backups from an OS/400-centric outlook. LXI has several clients testing the software, and the early results look promising, but more performance data is required before announcing it for general availability, Kormos says.

Help/Systems sells a product called Robot/Client that will allow OS/400 shops to backup Windows data to their AS/400 or iSeries server using Robot/Save, its backup, recovery, and vault management product. Like the Tivoli solution, however, it's a network-based backup, which is why Help/Systems recommends users only back up their Windows directors to minimize bandwidth requirements, says Tom Huntington, vice president of technical services for the Minnetonka, Minnesota, company.

"You can share tape drives and a lot of the hardware, but when it comes to tape management software, it's still pretty platform specific," says Huntington, who recommends a best of breed approach that includes Robot/Save, LXI's MMS, or BRMS on the OS/400 side, and Veritas, CA's BrightStor, and Tivoli software for open systems. "The problem is, it's a whole different ballgame. OS/400 is really unique compared to open systems."

So is Help/Systems, which works closely with IBM's iSeries development lab in Rochester, Minnesota, working to address the problem? "Have we talked about it? To use a Minnesota phrase, 'You betcha,'" Huntington says. "We all realize it's an issue."