Replacing Tape with Disk to Disk Backup: An Example Using Amanda Open Source Software in a Virtual Tape Environment

With the continued decrease in price for hard disk drive storage, it has become harder and harder to justify the high cost of magnetic tape for backup. Many organizations have shifted to using “virtual tape” as the primary backup medium and reserve magnetic tape for long term archival requirements. The AMANDA open source software developed at the University of Maryland is freely available and supported by Zmanda, a division of Carbonite Company. Our Engineering team has developed this guide for installing and configuring the AMANDA backup software on a SimplStor storage server as an example of a virtual tape library (VTL). AMANDA server is included in the distribution of RHEL-7/CentOS-7 that powers the SimplStor. The principles and approach described here are easily translated to other commercial or open source backup environments such as Bacula, Comodo, Netbackup, TSM/Spectrum Protect, Veeam and others.

Environment:

• AMANDA server configured on RHEL7/CentOS7 using native systemd as a Virtual Tape Library.
• AMANDA client configured on a minimal RHEL7/CentOS7 using native systemd and either traditional "bsdtcp" or encrypted "ssh" authentication.

To read the complete whitepaper, click here: SimplStor EL7 Amanda Backup Target.