I'd like your opinion on an alternative to tape drives that would use
amanda to organize backups.
Let's say that our amanda tape server would have a firewire connection
to an IDE drive. Since firewire is fast, and hot-pluggable, one could
unmount the drive, disconnect the firewire, swap out the IDE drive
with another each day, plug it back in, reformat and mount it.
Let's assume we have a stock of about forty 60 G IDE hard drives. On a
30 day cycle, we swap these drives, and at the beginning of the month,
put the most recent disk into cold storage for archive.
Each night, the tape server goes out and dumps to tape, but there being
no tape drive, sends the info instead to the holding disk, our firewire
special.
Looking at the costs, $100 for the firewire interface and $4200 for the
hard drives gives you the complete system, assuming you have a linux box
hanging around to mount it on. This compares favorably with a AIT system,
which looks to be about $3000 for the drive and $100 per tape, 15 tapes
needed for about a 2 week tapecycle. Advantages would be stability of
medium, speed of access, nonproprietary nature (which contributes to
redundancy, since any linux computer could mount the IDE drive).
Disadvantages - bulk/weight of disks, sensitivity to damage from dropping,
slightly more complicated procedure to change 'tapes', others I haven't
thought of yet...
So what do you think?
- Feasible?
- Anyone already doing this? (is this a solved problem?)
- What about indexing?
- What have I overlooked?
--
John Rodkey, Information Technology, Westmont College
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
