On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 11:18 -0500, Eric Chevalier wrote: > Hello, fellow Linux/390 list members! > > The company where I works runs a mainframe Debian system for a variety > of functions. One critical function is backing up the server that > provides our "public" Internet presence (Web, FTP, mail and so forth). > Every night we use rsync to backup the public system (which runs RHEL on > an Intel box) to our Debian system, which in turn is backed up to our > z/OS system using Tivoli Storage Manager. > > We've recently run into a situation where the amount of data coming from > the public server exceeds the space we've allocated for backups on the > Debian system. Right now, the backup data is written to an ext3 file > system mounted on a directory called "/archive". We're looking at > replacing that ext3 file system with something that can span multiple > physical drives. lvm2 seems an obvious solution, since it's fully > supported by Debian. I've also had a recommendation for Sun's ZFS, but > it looks like I might have to build ZFS from source since it's not > present in the apt repository that we're using. > > Based on some discussion about logical volumes from a month or so ago, > lvm2 seems like a reasonable approach at this point. But I'd definitely > welcome any suggestions from you folks who have already traveled down > this road.
Let's be clear about this, I'm not certain you understand the optiion. ext3 is a filesystem, you understand that bit, and that it's strictly single-volume. LVM and LVM2 are volume management systems, one uses them to combine single DASD volumes to create a larger, virtual disk. Then one partitions and formats the virtual disk in the usual way. Additional to that (and probably not relevant to you, but it might be nice to know) that one can also set up RAID systems involving network block devices (NBD and ENBD drivers), so one can have an ext3 filesystem on RAID and mirrored across virtual disks attached to different computers (and potentially the computers can be far apart). AFAIK there's no reason those disparate computers have to be the same architecture, so it might be possible to have your filesystem stored concurrently on your Intellish RHEL system and your zSeries Debian. There's a book, "Reliable Linux," discusses this and other matters. It _is_ getting a little old now. -- John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
