Cheap SAN solution

[maff]

Hi all,
We are an Art Institute and have large capacity servers for multimedia and photoshop students consisting of 3 Dell Poweredge servers with a total of 370GB of data.
We are looking at a temperary backup solution until we have the budget to get a fibre to storage area network.

Would it be feasable to buy a generic PC with a dual IDE interface motherboard and 8 80GB drives and backup over the network nightly. We have a CAT 5 100mpbs network, would this be fast enough to get the data copied across in one night?
Any ideas?



Matt ffolliott-Powell
maff_ffolliottpowell@yahoo.com

http://www.arts-inst-bournemouth.ac.uk

King of the wild frontier

 

[Guest_imported]

Yes, it's feasible but the system you propose is not very scalable. Another option would be to get one of the new motherboards that come with an IDE RAID controller, doubling the # of drives you can connect to 8 drives. You could certainly back up the entire 370Gigs (probably in one night but I expect that you won't want to back everything up Every night.... this is overkill.

Backup programs can do incremental backups (i.e. backing up 1/5 of the total every weekday)
or
All the data can be backed up followed by Delta (change in) adjustments
A Full backup can be followed by a series of small backups that consist of only those files that have been modified since the last full backup - this can get rather complicated and introduces a level of uncertainty if files are updated frequently.

Many people employ a combination of these strategies - but the software exists already for whatever you want to do. The trick to making it efficient is to separate the data that's constantly changing from that which is static.... if only 70Gig of the 370Gig changes in any particular period then you only need to backup that 70 every period (with any luck it'll be the same 70 each time) and the other data can be archived on more permanent media.

If you're dead set on backing up all 370 Gig daily, then you're gonna need to spend some cash ... I'd suggest forgetting the backup process.... it'd be easier to simply get a RAID and mirror drives in real time so you've always got a copy that's up to date.

A last word - hardware can expensive. I've always found the best prices at

http://www.pricewatch.com.

I'd suggest you at least check it b4 buying anything .... for standard pc items you simply can't beat the pricewatch price. Many retailers post discounted prices there tho some overcharge on the shipping charges to offset an artificially low hardware price. Other than that it's the cat's meow.

Good Luck,

PJ23
sf2files<at-unspaminator>pacbell.net

 

[maff]

Thanks PJ23,
Will check out your suggestions,

Matt

Matt ffolliott-Powell
maff_ffolliottpowell@yahoo.com

http://www.arts-inst-bournemouth.ac.uk

King of the wild frontier

 

[Brent71]

Another way would be to run replication software on your servers to replicate the data to your backup server. The advantage to this is that you won't have to spike your network when you run your backups at night. Infact this would allow you to run your backups off the backup server anytime you like since it would not affect production to do that. Some replication products even replicate delta changes realtime, decreasing network load dramatically. There are quite a few replication type software out there, but I have always liked the product Double-Take because it doens't create that much load on the network.

 

[thetford]

If your going to do backup over the main network (and you use the network during you backup period), I suggest instead getting an additional NIC (make a 1Gbps) for your 370GB Dell machine and one for your backup server and running a top end UTP cross-over cable between the two. Just run your backup application over that link. 1GB point-to-point will definitely do it and it won't bog down your main network.