Nutter examines the use of REV drives and NetWare
I own a small office with a Novell NetWare 6.5 server and 10 user licenses. I have been unhappy with tape backups, which frequently fail, and the tape drive device short life. I discovered the existence of the Iomega REV drive shortly after it became available, but have been unable to determine if there are NetWare drivers available for the SCSI REV drive. So far my contracted administrator has been no help. Are there drivers available for the REV drive so I can install it in the server and back up each night?
– Paul Penland
I took a look on Iomega’s Web site and found no support for NetWare. With the modularization of Novell’s driver architecture, you will actually need two different drivers – one for the SCSI controller you’re using and another for the tape drive. That is unless the vendor in question has written everything in one file. Unless you can get some information from Iomega from a developer standpoint and have the resources or can get someone to write the files you will need, you may need to start looking elsewhere.
James Gaskin’s “Small Business Tech”
Gaskin says Iomega’s REV drives could be the biggest product to hit the scene in years.
The option does exist for you to put the Iomega REV drive on a workstation and back up the server to the workstation. For the size network that you have, this is certainly an option worth considering. The thing to watch out for is whether the workstation-based backup program you will need to use will understand how to back up Novell’s directory service and the associated file/directory rights. If it doesn’t, it may not be a big deal because you aren’t running a high user count.
If backing up the directory and rights information is important, I would suggest looking at vendors that market tape back-up software to see if they support NetWare and what drivers they have tested with the version you have. Although Novell doesn’t have the market share it once had, you should still have a selection of tape drives to choose from. I have had good luck with HP drives as long as I followed the suggested maintenance intervals for running a cleaning tape, used tapes certified by the tape drive vendor and put the tape drive on a dedicated controller.
