Hello,
i am currently planning our future backup-system and i consider using Amanda
as software. But i am not shure if Amanda is the right thing for me. To help
you telling me if it is, here are some infos about our future environment and
setup:
- we will be starting with about 50 machines to backup, but this size will
grow.
- we will start with a native storage capacity of around 10-11 TB this will
grow, too.
- the storage will be provided by lots (starting with 7 to 13) of Linux
machines each having two Level-5 IDE-RAIDs with an effective capacity of
either 720 GB or 450 GB each(depends on the disksize we will use).
- we might decide to split up the system into 3 (or more) seperated systems
which will then be placed on different locations and do cross-location backups
to provide even more safety.
- i would prefer to group as much of storage space and clients together as
possible instead of balancing the load by hand.
- we have two tape-libs that we might want to use for archiving purposes.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions for me whether and how Amanda is suitable
for this task ?
You might consider that it probably will be an option for us to pay someone
for making changes to Amanda instead of buying a commercial product.
In special i couldn't figure out by reading the archive and documentation:
- whether an Amanda setup can use more than one Storage-Server (Tape-Server) ?
And share/balance the load on them ? (Do you know the concept of Storagenodes
Legato uses for its Networer software?)
- When using virtual tapes, will Amanda assign the diskspace on demand or will
it use eg. 500 MB for each virtual tape even if it effectively only uses 300
MB of it ?
Some weird ideas i have for this setup and that you might want to comment:
- if the clients could be dynamically assigned (based on backup-size/free
space on storage-machine, load of the storage-machines, and stuff like that)
to one of our storage machines on each backup run and talk
directly to them, would be just great. Something like backup-clustering ;-)
my favorite solution.
- as the CPUs of the Linux-storage machnines will be pretty idle most of
the time they could be used to compress or crypt the data.
Thanks for all your comments and help in advance
Arne Kloecker
