What will be better, please?
- Thread starter SvenKopitz
- Start date
digitALL...
can you explain how paul is right?
Starwind provides an ISCSI target...
he's got 37 PC's and want's 37 TB of centralised storage...
an ISCSI target would be great for providing A disk to A server, perhaps even starwind has multipath support so that it can be used on more than 1 machine, but windows doesn't have multipath support so all you're going to see when you hook 37 PCs up to the target at the same time is a whole load of corruption of files!
and lets face it, he wants to connect 37 PCs to a single storage device, so ISCSI is out of the window, he's already got to buy a decent server with several tons of disk space... then you're saying that he should spend a few thousand more dollars on the enterprise edition of starwind. an expensive solution that doesn't even fit the problem...
for the central storage...
there are essentially four options...
1, you buy a server with a lot of disk space
2, you buy a server and attach one of more SCSI Disk arrays to it and form the massive 37TB volume that you want.
3, you buy a server and connect to one or more ISCSI devices to make a massive disk. (but that's going to be a very flaky solution).
4, get a server, and connect it to a large fibre channel network. arguably the best (though also most expensive way) to get a 37TB singe volume for the backups (of workstations) that you want...
for backing up the central storage, as I said before lots and lots of tapes is probably your best solution. but to be honest I'd do as I suggested earlier in the thread...
rationalise the data... see what's most necessary to be backed up and start backing that up with the backup solution that you can afford now... in the future expand your backup solution as you need to...
can you explain how paul is right?
Starwind provides an ISCSI target...
he's got 37 PC's and want's 37 TB of centralised storage...
an ISCSI target would be great for providing A disk to A server, perhaps even starwind has multipath support so that it can be used on more than 1 machine, but windows doesn't have multipath support so all you're going to see when you hook 37 PCs up to the target at the same time is a whole load of corruption of files!
and lets face it, he wants to connect 37 PCs to a single storage device, so ISCSI is out of the window, he's already got to buy a decent server with several tons of disk space... then you're saying that he should spend a few thousand more dollars on the enterprise edition of starwind. an expensive solution that doesn't even fit the problem...
for the central storage...
there are essentially four options...
1, you buy a server with a lot of disk space
2, you buy a server and attach one of more SCSI Disk arrays to it and form the massive 37TB volume that you want.
3, you buy a server and connect to one or more ISCSI devices to make a massive disk. (but that's going to be a very flaky solution).
4, get a server, and connect it to a large fibre channel network. arguably the best (though also most expensive way) to get a 37TB singe volume for the backups (of workstations) that you want...
for backing up the central storage, as I said before lots and lots of tapes is probably your best solution. but to be honest I'd do as I suggested earlier in the thread...
rationalise the data... see what's most necessary to be backed up and start backing that up with the backup solution that you can afford now... in the future expand your backup solution as you need to...
You should have effective and reliable backup solution. As you told that you have 37 systems in your business network, so data protection is very necessary. Don't trust on various storage medias. As i got to know, that with 37 systems, your business data need to be secure.
I would recommend online data backup solution. Your whole business data get stored on a remote server and you can access your files or folders easily in case any disaster strike.
I think such data backup services would sure help you..
dude_56013
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It raises the question, how do places that back up data, back up THEIR data. 
Hehehehe .
Hehehehe .one of the companies that we support have roughly 4TB of data. that is backed up in the following way.
differential backups to tap (2 lto4 tapes) on a nightly basis (kept for one week)
full backups made on fridays, (4 LTO4 tapes) (job runs till sunday) to backup all data (Kept for 1 month)
full backups made on the last friday of the month -kept for a year
Full backups made on the last friday of the year -kept forever.
the tapes are all loaded into a robotic loader, so there is 1 tape drive, the tapes are put into a magazine and inserted into the robot and the robot picker picks up the tapes and loads it into the drive, (it decides the tape to load either by it's position in the magazine or by a bar code printed onto labels on each tape.
for another customer where we backup a lot more data we have a robotic loader that has two tape drives in it, another tape loader has four tape drives in it (that is a very large tape library that can have 24 tapes loaded at once.
but as I said before these tapes are expensive, the tape loaders and libraries are even more expensive and there is a finite throughput that can be written to the drive, (limited by the bus speed of the tape library connection bus, and the network that's going to the server that is controlling the jobs etc.
(if you allow the hours of between 6pm and 8am) you can practically backup on a single tape drive around 2TB. -that also allows time for the software or hardware to compress the data so that it actually fits onto a single drive.
(assuming that your media server is one device and that the tape drive is attached by SCSI to the one server).
to backup 37TB you can do a few things, but these are going to be limited.
step 1 would be to get an intelligent storage device that can control the tape library, that would take out a bottle neck at the network stage.
after this you're going to need to start looking at multiple tape drives.
So far as who backs up the data, the daily, weekly, monthly yearly tapes etc are collected from our data centres on a daily basis by a third party called Iron Mountain, they take the tapes away and store them in secure facilities. and deliver the next days tapes.
Practically, if you can throw enough resource at a backup problem then you can solve most through intelligent design and using the right equipment...
of course, the OPs backup requirements are 37TB.
there are 37 machines with 1TB drives,
the drives aren't going to be full,
there will be an amount, (probably at least 10GB) on each machine that is used by windows installation and program files.
there will undoubtedly be personal data that doesn't need to be backed up.
and even if the drives were absolutely full you need to figure out how much of the data is duplicated.
how many common project files are there that every one of the 37 computers each have, but you only need 1 backup copy of?
(this is why I said that they need to rationalise and actually think about what needs to be backed up).
what kind of biz are you in that you need to backup all the data on every machine this is nutty. You should simply have shares on the server where these people can save the stuff they need. Being in the biz the way i feel is if they really need it they will save it to mydocs (which we have redirected) or on the shares we haave out there that just a little nuts to backup all there junk gl going to cost alot
