Norton Ghost 15.0 - Ultrium Tape & RAID Arrays

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1

  I am considering purchasing Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0, but first I need to know whether Ghost will backup to LTO-5 media. My tape drive is a Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks LTO-5 Ultrium 3000 SAS Internal Tape Drive (EH957A). In addition, I also need to know whether Ghost is able to backup/restore from/to RAID 1 and/or RAID 6 arrays. Information about my computer's hardware, software and configuration is as follows.

 

  • Intel Workstation Chassis SC5650WS
  • Intel AXX6DRV3GR 6-Drive Hotswap Non-Expanded SATA/SAS Backplane Assembly Cage Kit
  • six Intel APPTHSDBKIT Hotswap Drive Mounting Kits
  • two Intel Thermal Solution STS100C Heatsinks
  • Intel APP3RACKIT Rack Conversion Kit for SC5650 Chassis
  • Pelican BB0110 BlackBox 11U Rack Mount Case
  • Intel S5520SCR Workstation Board
  • Intel SAS Entry RAID Module AXX4SASMOD
  • two Intel Xeon Six-Core X5680 3.33GHz Processors
  • nVidia Quadro FX5800 Graphics Card
  • six Kingston 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC CL9 2R RDIMMs
  • Intel RS2BL080 RAID Controller Card
  • Rosewill RC-503 PCIe USB2.0 Card
  • Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks LTO-5 Ultrium 3000 SAS Internal Tape Drive (as Drive B)
  • two Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 600GB 3.5" 15Krpm SAS 6Gbps HDDs, in a RAID 1 Array
    (partitioned into a 300GB boot partition, assigned the drive letter 'C', with 258.7GB left over as unallocated space)
  • Hewlett-Packard dvd1270i Multi-Format DVD Writer (as Drive D)
  • four Seagate Constellation ES 1TB 3.5" 7200rpm SAS 6Gbps HDD, in a RAID 6 Array
    (partitioned into three logical drives of 600GB each, with 62.6GB left over as unallocated space)
  • Lian Li CR-26 Internal USB2.0 Card Reader (as Drive H)
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition
  • Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Professional Edition
  • Microsoft Expression Studio 3
  • Autodesk AutoCAD Revit Architecture Suite 2011
  • Hewlett-Packard LP3065 30-inch Widescreen LCD Monitor
  • Microsoft Digital Media Keyboard 3000
  • Sennheiser PC-151 Binaural Headset
  • APC Smart-UPS XL Modular 1500VA 230V (SUM1500RMXLI2U +(1)SUM48RMXLBP2U)
  • Hewlett-Packard 50G Graphing-Calculator
  • Brother P-touch PT-2700 Label Printer
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I back from/to a Raid 0 (computer) and a Raid 1 (backup network drive) without a problem. Of course from my vantage point, the Windows operating system recognizes the disk drives as just regular SATA HDDs which I presume is the same view/interface Norton Ghost has of the system.  (I use a software NVIDIA Raid scheme.)  Some required tasks for a complete system recovery (booting from the "custom" Symantec Recovery Disk), is that I must supply the Raid drivers to the Symantec Recovery Disk in order for a complete system recovery to work in addition (manually) mapping the network drive once the system recovery environment is loaded/executing.

3

  My computer system has two RAID arrays, and all six of my HDDs are SAS disks.

  • a RAID 1 array which contains the 300GB Windows 7 boot partition - this array is based on the motherboard RAID 0/1/5 onboard capability.
  • a four-disk RAID 6 array which contains three 600GB data partitions - this array is based upon a separate RAID controller card, with a battery-backed cache.

 

  And my backup device is a Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks LTO-5 Ultrium 3000 SAS Internal Tape Drive. Put in a nutshell, what I need to know is:

   1. Does Ghost support backing up from and restoring to hardware-based RAID 1 and RAID 6 arrays?

   2. Does Ghost support backing up to and restoring from LTO-5 Ultrium Data Tape Media?

   3. If Norton Ghost does not have these capabilities, would Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 Desktop Edition be a better choice?

4

Ghost 15 officially supports RAID 0, 1, and 5.  It's not certified against RAID 6, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.  As to supporting tape media, Ghost does support backup to Tape and has so for some time.  BESR and Ghost are co-developed and support the same RAID levels.  I believe Ghost 15 and BESR 2010 are the same revisions, but if you want to double check the RAID support I recommend checking out the Enterprise forum:

 

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