
2.6 Components That Scale 111
Chapter 2
operation. I have seen rates of up to 200 GB per hour when backing up to
disk farms; specialized virtual tape libraries, which are no more than a dedi-
cated server connected with many links to a SAN infrastructure, can exceed
600 GB per hour.
Similar or higher rates can be observed when backing up to fast tape
drives such as LTO-3. Even if you opt for a backup to a disk farm, which
would presumably speed up the restore time, you will still need to archive
the disk-based backups to tape media for archiving purposes. So backup to
disk can be good, but it is not a complete solution in itself, unless you use a
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