On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Eric Trager wrote:
>Is what hardware compression can do with files variable? In this case,
>with the failure, it's a lot of oracle data, some of it is gzipped.
This is precisely why I do not use hardware compression. The
effectiveness of the compression varies heavily based on what kind of
data you are backing up. Chances are 50GB of gzip'd data is not going
to compress any at all. I run a fast dual PIII as my tape server and it
handles doing the software compression for me just fine. With software
compression planner's estimates are much more accurate and I sleep
easier at night knowing that my filesystems are reliably getting taped,
and if there is a problem that anything that wasn't taped was compressed
and stuck in my holding disk to be flushed the following morning. My
holding disk probably wouldn't hold an entire run uncompressed, but with
software compression a $100 hard disk can hold an entire run.
--
Brandon D. Valentine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Computer Geek, Center for Structural Biology
"This isn't rocket science -- but it _is_ computer science."
- Terry Lambert on [EMAIL PROTECTED]
