[SLL] Hardware Recommendation

[Derek Simkowiak]

Dave> /Someone commented that RAID would not protect in the case of 
physical damage. This is understood and is why archiving to a removable 
medium is a requirement. /

    A removable medium will not protect you in the event of fire, theft, 
earthquake (Seattle's due for a big one), or the ceiling of your server 
room collapsing in a flood of dirty dishwater and fishguts from the 
restaurant on the floor above.  (The smell was /horrible/.)

    I recommend automatic, Internet-based offsite backup.  Rsync over 
SSH works very well.  Then share the backup with a VPN plus WebDAV, FTP, 
or SAMBA, or even plain old SSH (SCP/SFTP), and your clients can get 
transparent (or nearly transparent, depending on the protocol) 
drag'n'drop access to the backup files.  That offsite backup could be 
your "Highly Available" solution, too, because if your onsite file 
server dies, the client can just go to the offsite backup until things 
are fixed.

    But of course it depends on your needs.  A nightly rsync or Unison 
backup works a little differently than RAID.  If you need 
up-to-the-second backup, RAID is your best option.  But if you want the 
ability to retrieve an accidentally-deleted file from yesterday, then 
RAID won't help you.  Or, if your clients are working with HUGE files 
(like video production, GIS data, etc.) then a nighly offsite backup at 
2Mbit might not be practical...


--Derek

Dave Pfaltzgraff wrote:
> I've already gotten some good feedback from the group and will be looking
> further into it. However, in the meantime, I remembered that the system is
> running a Perforce server. Perforce frowns on putting their files on NAS
> and of course that wouldn't work for off-site storage. So my options are
> narrowed down a little.
>
> Someone commented that RAID would not protect in the case of physical
> damage. This is understood and is why archiving to a removable medium is a
> requirement. The RAID implementation was to achieve high reliability. I
> know it does this as one time I was able to recover from a head crash
> without much more than a lot of sweat!;)
>
> Thanks for the pointers!
> Dave
>
> ====
> On Thu, June 5, 2008 2:03 pm, Dave Pfaltzgraff wrote:
> ----8< snip
> I know I may be opening a can of worms but I'd be interested in
> recommendations from the group. Some of my options are:
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