Jeff,

We just happen to be working on a new solution for our HP 3000 backups.
We have several 3000s, each one with several DATs.  My operations manager
wanted to upgrade and purchase several DLTs.  An improvement yes; however,
I thought that there had to be a better way.

In fact, I was able to find a better way.  I regularly receive flyers from
a company called Cybernetics advertising various backup solutions.  They
have a line of devises called the High Speed Tape Cache (HSTC).  These
devises are meant to help shops streamline backup by doing Disk-to-Disk-to-
Tape backups.  After a little more research of my own and phone calls to
their very technical salesmen, Steve Jones, I was convinced this was the
solution for us.  They typically work with AS/400 shops, but stated that
they thought their technology would work on 3000s too.

So for about the same price as the DLTs that my operations manager wanted
to purchase, we were able to configure a much more streamlined backup
solution for our HP 3000s and windows environment.

Our configuration consists of a HSTC with a SCSI attached RAID array with
over 3.3GB of usable disk and several iSCSI units.  Believe it or not, we
have our 957 connected to the HSTC via iSCSI and it works great!!!  It
looks just like a DLT drive to the 3000.  An iSCSI box is connected to the
3000's HVD SCSI and to our GB Ethernet.  Then the HSTC has two connections
to our GB Ethernet.  On the HSTC you configure virtual tape drives and
virtual tapes.  On the 3000 you just configure it as a regular old DLT
drive.  There are more details to our configuration, but basically we will
be backing up all our 3000s to the HSTC using the MPE Store command.  Then
the HSTC will do a binary copy of the Stores to a physical tape for off-
site storage.  We will have tape drives connected directly to the HSTC and
one hanging off another iSCSI box.

Benefits to using this system are many.  One of those being that the
stores happen just as fast as Store-to-Disk directly to the drives on the
3000, but only use as much CPU as a regular Store-to-Tape.

This solution is very flexible and I'm sure they have a solution for just
about any configuration.  It works great with our windows/veritas backups
and we plan on backing our HP-UX box up to it also.

<Plug>

If you are interested, check out Cybernetics at
http://www.cybernetics.com/.  I am not affiliated with this company in any
way, but have been impressed with their very intelligent salesmen, Steve
Jones, their technology, which no other company comes close to duplicating
at this price and their very helpful and attentive technical support.
Steve's number is (757) 833-9000 x 346.  Just let him know you are looking
for a backup solution for your HP 3000s.

</Plug>

Gene Calai

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