Review: Certance CP 3100

Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) products come in a range of sizes. Higher-end devices include terabytes of disk and tape storage and are designed to simultaneously back up a network full of servers. These units are best-suited to your midsize accounts. For accounts with more modest needs, there is the Certance CP 3100, which offers full D2D2T functionality in a small footprint and at an affordable price. Though, time permitting, it could back up a midsize network of servers, in its current configuration it really shines as a one- or two-server backup device.

The CP 3100 I tested came with a 160-GB SCSI disk drive (externally expandable to 1 TB) and a DAT 72 (DDS-4 compatible) tape drive with an uncompressed capacity of 36 GB. It's also available as a D2D-only product with a disk capacity up to 360 GB, in which case you have to supply a DDS-4 or DAT 72 tape drive if you want the D2T part of D2D2T. CP 3100 units also come with a 10/100/1000 Ethernet jack. You connect the CP 3100 to your computer's SCSI adapter using a SCSI LVD HD68 cable.The CP 3100 emulates a DAT 72 tape autoloader. This means the disk of the unit looks to a backup program like a tape drive with a series of tape cartridge slots. Each slot is populated with a virtual tape. Archiving of disk-based backups to tape is totally automatic. You can also manually migrate backups to tape. When you restore a migrated file, it's automatically pulled from the tape without intermediary migration back to disk.

The CP 3100 is managed using a Web browser-based utility. You use the utility to configure time and date, change the device's password and IP address, and set e-mail addresses for notifications. Notifications even include a URL that opens the management utility. You also use the utility to eject and erase tapes, view tape status, migrate backups to tape and set parameters for each tape, such as "do not archive" or "do not migrate."

I found the CP 3100 very easy to use. First, I was able to use it with my clients' favorite backup program, Veritas' Backup Exec, which automatically manages tapes in an autoloader. Second, once I understood how archiving and migration works, I took great comfort in the knowledge that my disk-based backups were safely cocooned on tape and were readily recoverable from disk or tape without my doing anything other than assuring that the correct tape was in the CP 3100's drive.

Certance says it will supply a firmware upgrade for the CP 3100 that includes iSCSI support. That would allow the device to receive backups from multiple networked computers over a 1-Gbps pipe. The company has not announced the cost of the iSCSI firmware upgrade license.