Fujitsu Siemens FibreCAT TX24 review

Fujitsu Siemens has been aggressively marketing automated tape backup for SMBs with its "My very first Robot" initiative. This centres round its FibreCAT autoloaders, with the TX24 on review equipped with a pair of HP LTO-2 half-height tape drives and 24 slots for a total native capacity of 4.6TB.

The TX24 is a 2U rack-mount chassis that exhibits the same classy build quality as Fujitsu Siemens' Primergy servers. The rubberised front cover is endowed with a large backlit LCD and manual control pad, and there's room for a 12-slot magazine on each side. The review system had all slots activated, but you can reduce costs by buying a 12-slot licence and increasing the count later on. The right-hand magazine incorporates an import/export slot, too, for adding media without taking the system offline. Having two tape drives brings into play products such as EMC Networker, which supports media cloning. This can take two copies of a backup and, on completion, one can be exported for off-site storage.

The operator panel provides full access for configuring SCSI IDs and the import/export slot. It can be used to view slot contents, unload and load cartridges, and move them around the magazines and drives. The Fast Ethernet port indicates remote management is on the cards, and the TX24 presents a useful multilingual web interface that provides access to the same functions as the front panel. Both web and local access can be password protected, and the autoloader can be configured to send out email alerts in the event of an error.

For testing, we used a Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 server running Windows Server 2003 R2. Backup software came courtesy of the A-Listed Symantec Backup Exec 10d (web ID: 81450) and CA ARCserve 11.5 (web ID: 78869), and we partnered them with EMC's Retrospect 7.5 (web ID: 86296). ARCserve needs SP3 applied and Backup Exec requires the latest driver patch, but even though Retrospect isn't certified it worked straight out of the box.

The TX24 was correctly identified by all three products, where they displayed all 24 slots and provided full access to the drive and slots, allowing us to run inventories and move tapes around. We liked Retrospect's modus operandi, as it required no further configuration and let us drag and drop tapes.

For speed testing, we used an 8GB mixture of files and asked each product to secure the data to the TX24. With LTO-2 at the helm, performance was as expected, with ARCserve and Backup Exec delivering 23.8MB/sec and 22.2MB/sec respectively, while Retrospect returned 21.9MB/sec.

LTO has always been the best choice for mid-range backup, and the TX24 shows why, as it offers a high capacity, top performance and the potential to upgrade as storage demands increase. For the rest of the year, the base model comes with an extra magazine and you get a full single-server version of CA's ARCserve Backup 11.5 and its XOsoft Enterprise Rewinder continuous protection software, making it look very good value.

Author: Dave Mitchell