On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Waters, Jeff wrote:
> Why use Circular Logging??
Does it make a difference? Our thinking is basically: Given the lack of
separate disks, and given a full backup every night, turning circular
logging off would not gain us anything. Given the principle of not making
changes without sufficient reason (i.e., if it ain't broke, don't fit it),
we just never bothered turning it off. Do you think we should?
> At your point it really becomes a point of how important is this
> information to the business. When I started here, we were a small org
> of about 300-500 users ...
To us, that is a large organization. We are in the below-50-users range,
here. If you are not used to working in these environments, you have no
idea what it is like.
These sorts of businesses simply do not have an IT staff. They do not
have a separate IT budget -- a computer is a special purchase from general
funds. They ask questions like, "Do we really need a tape backup drive?",
or "Do we really need a UPS for the server?", or "Do we really need a
firewall for the Internet?". We sometimes have to argue to convince people
they should use a server at all. You would be amazed at how many SOHOs
consider a shared folder on a Windows 98 desktop PC to be a "server".
They also have nowhere near the availability needs of a large
organization. They can generally do their work without the computers.
They have paper redundancy for everything, because they are not
sophisticated enough to do without it. Even for our larger customers (i.e.,
40 or 50 users), a RAID array and redundant power supplies is about as fault
tolerant as they get.
For a serious disaster (e.g., building burns down), the recovery plan is
usually something like "chapter seven bankruptcy liquidation". They simply
do not consider a disaster of that magnitude to be something they could
survive.
> What a lot of people don't take into consideration when they are putting
> everything on the same server is the amount of time it takes to get the
> server backup, not only do you have to do a exchange disaster recovery,
> now you have to install all the apps, restore all the other share data,
> recreate all the network printers, etc....
A complete backup, including registry, online Exchange, etc., should cover
all that, no?
> At some point the cost of the SCSI controller and a couple of hard
> drives starts to have a cost benefit.
Indeed, and we argue that all the time. We usually can at least convince
people that mirrored drives is a good idea. Our largest customers (again,
still less than 50 users) go all out and have hot-swap drives and hardware
RAID controllers.
> The bottom line is that no matter what the size of your organization the
> server (no matter what it is doing) has to be built to meet the business
> needs it supports ...
I do realize that. However, the business needs -- and available funds --
are very small for our customer base. With all this talk of separate
drives, I was just starting to get worried that our configurations are
likely to cause *unexpected* data loss. Again, everyone is aware of the
risk to data between backups. What I am worried about is this configuration
causing data loss by itself.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not |
| necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or |
| organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. |
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