Re: Informix 7.3 backup utility for SCO

I've found that onbar isn't much faster than ontape unless you're backing up to multiple tapes at the same time (i.e., striping across tapes). If you have a good, fast tape drive with hardware compression (supported by the OS), you won't buy much performance by switching to onbar, and you WILL buy some headaches, because storage managers (required by onbar) can be a huge pain to configure correctly. (Particularly Legato). Given a DLT-7000 drive supporting data compression, you should be able to get a realistic data copy rate of 2-2.5 MB/sec. Which means it would take roughly 6-7 hours to back up that much data. This assumes a level-0 archive, with 50 GB worth of pages USED in the engine (OnLine does not back up unused pages), with a single tape drive. Given the same single DLT-7000 with OnBar, you're looking at perhaps 10% performance improvement at best. We've seen less than that. You really don't reap the benefits of Onbar's parallel backup until you start striping across multiple tape drives -- an operation which REQUIRES storage managers costing tens of thousands of dollars. If anyone has had a different experience, I'd love to hear it. - Tom Girsch Database Systems Manager Arch Communications Group, Inc. Gary Quiring wrote in message <365ada38.8965251@news.netlabs.net>... >I'm a new user to Informix, and I need a backup solution for SCO 5.0.5 >running 7.3 Online-Workgroup. > >We have about 50 gig of Informix tables to backup. I'm told the ontape >command would be too slow. I'm told 7.3 has the onbar utility and that >would be the best solution. I looked at Lagato's page, but they only >support AIX, HP and Solaris. > >I got a price quote from ArcServe and they want $5700 per server. We have >two servers and $11,400 dollars for backup software is just too much. >ArcServe prices their software based on the server size, which in our case >is a 4 processor Xeon server. > >Gary Quiring >