Product Reviews

One of the biggest problems facing small businesses looking for tape-based network backup is value. The latest high-speed drives can cost as much as the server they're supposed to be protecting, forcing many to opt for a lower-cost but much slower drive. D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape) could be the answer, as this technology aims to provide fast primary backup to an external hard disk followed by phased data migration to secondary-level tape .

Formerly Seagate RSS, Certance claims to be the first D2D2T device to market with the CP 3100 range. The family consists of a number of solutions and the model on review brings disk and tape backup together in a compact desktop chassis. The biggest difference between this and other D2D2T solutions is that rather than appear on the network as a vault, the CP 3100 uses its internal storage to present a virtual DDS-4 or DAT72 autoloader to the host system. The type of autoloader is dependent on the physical drive installed: the virtual device defaults to a total of 25 slots.

At the heart of the CP 3100 is the controller unit running a Linux kernel. This delivers Certance's DPA (data protection architecture) technology, which provides the virtual autoloader capabilities. The unit holds a removable 160GB SATA hard disk and offers a pair of Ultra160 SCSI channels, with one connected internally to the tape drive and the other for external links to the host system. The

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controller also has two SATA interfaces for storage expansion, but these aren't available in this version.

Connecting the appliance to a Windows Server 2003 system, we found installation to be virtually plug and play, with only the medium changer requiring any new drivers. The browser interface is easy to navigate, providing plenty of information about the virtual slots and physical tapes, and offering good email alerting facilities. The idea behind DPA is that you back up your data to the virtual tape using standard backup software. Using predefined policies the appliance then archives the data to the corresponding physical tape after a specific time. Data is then migrated to the physical tape, again after a specified period, simply by placing a marker on the virtual tape that effectively erases all data. Note that although you can also use DDS-4 and DDS-3 media, the tapes must be completely blank, preferably using a bulk eraser, otherwise they will fail to be accepted.

Certance hasn't been overly generous with the bundled TapeWare XE software, as this supports only local backup from one host server. If you want support for backing up network clients, you'll need to upgrade to the full version. The CP 3100 certainly delivers in the performance stakes, a disk-to-disk backup of 8.5GB of test data returning an average transfer rate of 1,077MB/min - comparable to SLDT320 and faster than LTO-1. The default archiving policy started five minutes later where the more pedestrian DAT72 returned 184MB/min while copying the data to tape. The browser interface provides a real-time job status report. There's no reason why other backup software can't be used instead, and we found that the CP 3100 also worked with Computer Associates ARCserve R11.

The CP 3100 is a smart amalgamation of disk and tape that delivers good backup performance and simple automated data migration. Installation is swift, remote management is good and the appliance costs a lot less than many mid-range tape drives.