On 4 February 2010 18:14, Svein Skogen (Listmail Account) < svein-listm...@stillbilde.net> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 04.02.2010 17:57, Matthew Seaman wrote: > > On 04/02/2010 15:35, Svein Skogen (Listmail Account) wrote: > > > >> On a monthly rotation the tapes are placed in a firetolerant safe. Since > >> the most critical thing here is the terabyte (and growing!) of original > >> photographs, I'm not thinking about just day-to-day diskfailure or > >> pebcaks (proper raid and snapshotting handles that rather well). However > >> snapshotting and raid solutions handles the house being on fire rather > >> poorly, or should we say "Data integrity and fires, get along like a > >> house on fire"? ;) > > > > fire tolerant? That doesn't sound amazingly effective to me. Would it > > stand up to temperatures in excess of 600degC for more than about 20 > > minutes? That's going to be fairly typical in a house fire... > > Well, this one is the kind placed within the concrete of our cellar > (this is a home solution, not an industry one). But that area isn't > suitable for the servers for other reasons. The cellar is within the > bedrock of the area (the house foundation is directly on bedrock, and > the cellar area has been blasted out from the bedrock), so discounting > the plane-crash-into-building scenario, it's rather safe for our use > (and the plane-crash scenario would quite likely invalidate me along > with the backup, and so the need for a restore wouldn't be that critical) > > > A safe like that is a good idea for local storage of backup media while > > it waits to go into the tape library or off-site. It's a bad idea for > > storing your entire archive. > > > > *snip* > > > > > Tape libraries are horribly expensive since they're not mass market > > items. They are also intrinsically prone to breaking down or failing > > to work quite as well as the salesman implied. They're the only viable > > solution when your storage volumes get really huge, but what is > > considered huge nowadays is rather more than terabyte scale. If you can > > get away with just a single tape drive you'll save yourself a lot of > > money. > > Alas, a full backup of the current disk setup takes 4 tapes and ... I > really don't feel like staying up one entire night per week to swap > tapes (both for the backup and the verify). The autoloader I've got now > (8 slot, 1 drive, LTO-3, SAS) works fairly well with the currently > installed OS (Windows Storage Server 2008), giving about 60MB/Sec > sustained transfer rate. > > > LTO4 tapes are rated at 800--1600GB depending on achievable compression, > > so they might be big enough on their own. As image formats are already > > internally compressed, I'd expect them to come in at the low end of > > that, which might be tight. Worth trying out if you can get a drive on > > evaluation. > > A standalone LTO-4 might be a good alternative, if I didn't already have > the tapeloader. ;) > > > You might want to evaluate getting a bunch of 1TB (or larger) hard dives > > -- either USB or hot-swap SATA. They don't need to perform particularly > > well, but they'd have to be rated for a lot of spin-up/spin-down cycles > > (so something aimed at the mobile PC market). > > > > One other thing you should seriously consider is on-line backup. There > > are quite a lot of providers out there, and they should be at least > > competitive with running your own dedicated backup system. They also > > generally have the advantage of being instantly available if you need to > > recover anything in a hurry. > > Online-backup-solutions are a no-go for me, alas. > > >> Someone told me that Amanda should handle this, and I'm looking into it > >> now (especially reading up on what I'd need to do to handle disaster > >> recovery), but other options are welcome as well, including the option > >> of going Solaris (if someone can point me to proper documentation on how > >> to get Solaris to do what I want). > > > > Also checkout Bacula. I've found Bacula quite a lot easier to manage > > than Amanda, especially with tape libraries. > > > >> The box itself is a C2D E7500 with 8GB ram, Asus P5Q Premium (the > >> "deluxe" version with fewer NICs is on the BigAdmin HCL, basically an > >> intel P45 chipset with sufficient number of pci-express slots, and four > >> Marvell Yukon gigabit nics with Marvell Alaska PHY), backed by LSI > >> SAS-MPT for the autoloader and SAS-MFI for the disks, and will handle > >> SMB/CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI services (and the backups of that data). > >> Nothing fancy here, meaning it should hardwarewise be no biggie to get > >> it up and running in FreeBSD, Solaris (or leave it on Windows Storage > >> server if that's the best solution, even if that means the > >> iSCSI-target-service has ... less than stellar performance). > > > >> So, I'm basically looking for pointers on what solutions to consider, > >> not looking for a pre-cooked solution. I have sufficient external > >> diskspace (still with redundancy) to handle the move-to-new-os-and-fs > >> issue... > > > >> Thanks again for taking the time to help me out here. ;) > > > > Hard to know what to advise OS-wise. FreeBSD will do the job, although > > I'm not sure the iSCSI-target stuff is the best available. So will > > Solaris for that matter, although more likely to suffer from hardware > > incompatibilites. I really haven't got a clue about how well Windows > > would perform although I personally would avoid it simply because it was > > Windows... > > Windows was chosen as ... the least painful alternative at the time, and > luckily I'm pragmatic about computing OS'es. They're all broken and > prone to crashes. :p > > //Svein > > - -- > - --------+-------------------+------------------------------- > /"\ |Svein Skogen | sv...@d80.iso100.no > \ / |Solberg Østli 9 | PGP Key: 0xE5E76831 > X |2020 Skedsmokorset | sv...@jernhuset.no > / \ |Norway | PGP Key: 0xCE96CE13 > | | sv...@stillbilde.net > ascii | | PGP Key: 0x58CD33B6 > ribbon |System Admin | svein-listm...@stillbilde.net > Campaign|stillbilde.net | PGP Key: 0x22D494A4 > +-------------------+------------------------------- > |msn messenger: | Mobile Phone: +47 907 03 575 > |sv...@jernhuset.no | RIPE handle: SS16503-RIPE > - --------+-------------------+------------------------------- > If you really are in a hurry, mail me at > svein-mob...@stillbilde.net > This mailbox goes directly to my cellphone and is checked > even when I'm not in front of my computer. > - ------------------------------------------------------------ > Picture Gallery: > https://gallery.stillbilde.net/v/svein/ > - ------------------------------------------------------------ > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v2.0.12 (MingW32) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ > > iEYEARECAAYFAktrDnkACgkQODUnwSLUlKR8swCgs20KjWiGKoNJK/llELC3PcNL > CyoAoLkDFCvYU8NyI80gF5RVxuo5FWcH > =X40n > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to " > freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org" > If you do decide to go with zfs as the file system and need stability, I would go for solaris 10 as thats where is the most mature and stable zfs platform. As mentioned in a previous post you might get compatibility issues. A good alternative would then be opensolaris. I would stick to 2009.06 at the moment though for it as its been out a while and proved to be reliable. Having said all that I run zfs on freebsd, but its far more immature and not officially supported by the zfs team, so it more of a risk than the other platforms. _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"