On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, John Abreau wrote: > Rich Payne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > How many clients are you talking about? I would strongly reccomend > > looking into some sort of network attached storage device. We use Network > > Appliance machines. At my previous employer we started out with a pair of > > Suns and hardware raid 5, then went over to the NetApps. They just serve > > files for a living, and they do it well. > > I'd have to agree with this. Once you get past the sticker shock, the > NetApp appliances are awesome. I found them to be fast and reliable, and > the snapshot feature is a lifesaver. At any point in the filesystem, you > can access a read-only ".snapshot" directory to recover older files.
Yes, they are a bit expensive I admit, but then again, what's your data worth to you? > If you delete a file, or overwrite it, there's a copy in .snapshot/hour0/ > to recover it from. If I recall correctly, the system retains 7 hourly and > 7 nightly xnapshots by default. So you can always recover a file to its > previous state from 1 hour ago, 2 hours, etc, and 1 day ago, 2 days ago, > etc. It's actually configurable by the administrator. You can choose how many shanpshots to keep, how often to take them and how much disk space they can take up. > The snapshots are actually pointing at the same inodes that the main file > used; if a file hasn't been changed for at least a week, then all the > snapshots are sharing the same inodes for that file. One interesting thing I found out about the NetApps is that the physical position of each disk isn't important. You can take all the disks out, put them back in a different order, even in different shelves and when you power the box back on it will find everything and go on it's way! -- Rich Payne http://talisman.mv.com _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
