Storage Server

[vetteguy]

The head of my department and I have been talking about backups recently, and he's tired of paying a lot of money for tapes that are relatively small by comparison to hard drives. I realize that hard drives are generally not considered reliable backup media, but with the recent trend in huge, low-priced drives, you have to admit they're attractive. I told him that some people were using large removable drives as daily backups, and DVDs as archive copies, and I got him interested (d'oh!). So, I have been charged with putting together a proposal for a storage/backup server. This would be used to backup our main file servers/Exchange database daily, with DVDs used to archive "critical" data. Here is what I put together as an initial "what-if":

Western Digital 200GB 7200RPM Hard Drive $256x8
Aluminum Hard Drive removable enclosure $60x8
Aluminum RaidMax 8 bay PC tower $100
Pentium 4 Motherboard $100
512MB DDR RAM $200
80GB Hard Drive $100
10/100/1000 Intel PCI NIC $43x4
Antec TruPower 550Watt PSU $150
1.8 P4 $100
ATA133 Controller card $50x2

Basically, these drives would all sit in the server as separate volumes (not RAID'ed), and would be swapped as they were used to backup the other servers. I put 4 gigabit NICs in there so that each of the main servers (4) would have a dedicated connection to the storage server, and backup traffic would not flood the normal network. I could also easily do a SCSI connection I would imagine, but gigabit ethernet wouldn't be as expensive.

So, what do you think? I know it's doable, I was just curious as to what people think. We would not eliminate our tapes, but we have a large amount of "less-than-critical" data that these drives could be used to backup. Anyone else ever done something like this?

 

[BurnItDwn]

decent Idea ... however i think its a mistake not to Raid. if the data is important at all ... and this is your only backup ... you should at least use Raid 5.

 

[vetteguy]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
decent Idea ... however i think its a mistake not to Raid. if the data is important at all ... and this is your only backup ... you should at least use Raid 5.

Except then I lost the ability to remove disks and store them as backups...the idea here is to back up to 1 (or 2 depending on how much data there is) every night and remove the disks and store them somewhere else, then swap with different ones. I guess in that case I wouldn't need to have 8 going at once, really I could have just 2 or 3 and then swap out. If I RAID, I can't swap the disks every night.

Another option I've thought of is to have a USB2.0 external enclosure that accepts drive enclosures sitting on each of the servers, and backup to those every night.

 

[vetteguy]

I just thought of something that may throw a hitch into my plan. I had intended for these disks to be swapped out and stored every day after a backup was completed. However, since I'm not doing RAID (every drive will be its own entity) I can't really pull them out while the system is running, can I? I mean, physically I could pull the enclosure but unless it's on a RAID card which supports hot-swapping won't it cause problems? If so, what are my options? Can I configure a RAID card just to address each drive as separate (and thus just use it for its hot-swappability)? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

 

[m2kewl]

what i have at work is a 1tb ide raid5 (6x200gb) server for daily backups. attached is a dlt autoloader for weekly rotations and archiving monthly backups from the server to tapes.

 

[vetteguy]

Originally posted by: m2kewl
what i have at work is a 1tb ide raid5 (6x200gb) server for daily backups. attached is a dlt autoloader for weekly rotations and archiving monthly backups from the server to tapes.

I'm interested in your setup...how do you do daily backups? Do you just dump it all to the giant tb partition? Or do you swap disks?

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

I don't know too much about storage servers, but check out www.dell.com since they have some really nice storage servers.