Thanks for all the input! We are still thinking this through. The political issues are not really the big problem - we're a small but squeaky customer and we have gotten a fair amount of help. It's just that we're paying for more than we need , in some ways.
Our most important data, which is also our confidential data, lives on separate servers, on a separate, redundant network, and we'll certainly keep backing that up with Legato. The bulk of our data, however, is "less important". We're a design school so the coursework and projects involve very large files: GIS data, 3D models, CAD files, movies and animation, taped lectures, all sorts of bulky stuff. We are increasingly expecting that students and professors will keep their *own* copies of their data. We've got customer expectations set fairly low in terms of restores; we do not keep archival backups. But we do need to keep *some* sort of copy just in case the whole system blows. Then, we've got some in-between stuff, mostly our production web servers. An additional consideration is that we want to be able to get those up and running in the event of a disaster, without having to wait for the sort of delays we'd see if we were restoring three TB from tape. But again, behind the guts of the web servers lie some very large image archives. In an emergency, we could get up and running without having all the image archives accessible. Most of our data is stored on a couple of Solaris boxes runnng ZFS, attached to a central IT SAN, an EMC DMX. There's a perception that this is *very* reliable storage and not likely to blow. But, we don't want to run without a net (between ZFS and human error, something is always possible, and I've got two systems with 1TB ZFS pools each, so we could blow a lot at once) Keeping a mirror of these file systems on a standalone storage device connected to another server on another subnet is starting to look a heck of a lot cheaper than running everything through the very expensive, very secure Legato infrastructure. Again, this would be for our "tier 2" data, NOT for any mission-critical databases. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
