I've embraced centralized storage in a big way with the hopes that it would facilitate the backup process (e.g. if you have all the data and boot images on one system you don't even worry about doing network backups). In the last six months I've deployed 3 Solaris/ZFS storage servers to handle storage needs for my home office and 2 remote colos.
I've been using Amanda for about a year now but have run into a number of problems when the volume of data starts scaling into the Terabytes. I think Amanda is capable of dealing with much more, but I'm finding that the Best Practices for doing this aren't very well documented. So I'm going to outline what I've been doing and what challenges I've been encountering in hopes that we all might be able to collectively improve the documentation for these kind of scenarios...which if increasingly important as more and more folks take the leap as I have to centralized storage architectures. Here's what my infra looks like: ZFS1: (home office / desktop farm) Norco 4020 chassis (20 drive capacity) SuperMicro m/b with onboard LSI1068E SAS HP SAS expander SAS expander connects to onboard SAS ports and to Norco SAS backplane SAS expander has external SAS port allowing future expansion to another SAS JBOD chassis (e.g. Norco #2 or whatever) LSI 9200-8e SAS2 controller External 8 drive SANS digital SAS enclosure SANS digital connected to LSI9200-8e via two SAS wide ports 9 Hitachi 2TB in Norco case in RaidZ2, plus 2 spares, 12TB usable I'll be doubling this to 24TB shortly as almost out of space. Current ZPOOL look like this: rz2pool 12T 900G 1.2T 42% /rz2pool rz2pool/bootimages 12T 36G 1.2T 3% /rz2pool/bootimages rz2pool/cxxxx 12T 2.6T 1.2T 68% /rz2pool/cxxxx rz2pool/exp 12T 7.3G 1.2T 1% /rz2pool/exp rz2pool/mace 12T 7.5T 1.2T 86% /rz2pool/mace rz2pool/macedb 12T 19G 1.2T 2% /rz2pool/macedb rz2pool/projects 12T 695K 1.2T 1% /rz2pool/projects rz2pool/tftpboot 12T 8.7G 1.2T 1% /rz2pool/tftpboot rz2pool/vmware 12T 48K 1.2T 1% /rz2pool/vmware The bulk of the data to be backup is from the MACE pool which contains real-time traffic captures from a bank of 100 PCs that are doing generalized web surfing. There is about 100GB/week of data added here. 3 Hitachi 2TB drives in SANS Digital case in RAID0 for Amanda holding disk 20+ Hitachi drives for backup "tapes" to be swapped in and out of 5 remaining SANs digital "slots" My overall plan here is to use the Norco case for capacity expansion. Use 3-drives in the SAS digital for Amanda holding disk as follows: # df -h amandadump 4.0T 3.2T 785G 81% /amandadump # zpool status amandadump pool: amandadump state: ONLINE NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM amandadump ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t21d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t22d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t23d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 And then use the other 5 available "slots" in the SANs digital chassis for hot-swapping disk-based "tapes" as needed. I've been formatting individual 1.5TB or 2TB drives to be "tapes", e.g.: # zpool status tap0102 pool: tap0102 state: ONLINE config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM tap0102 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t26d0 ONLINE 0 0 # df -h | grep tap tap0102 1.3T 1.3T 0K 100% /tap0102 Here are some of the challenges/questions: My full backups are huge (multi-TB) so filling tapes is not a problem. However, daily incremental might only be 20-30GB. Since I'm using 1.5 and/or 2TB drive for "tapes" I'm able to get good "filling" of the tapes when doing full backups, but I'll potentially only fill up 50GB other times....this potentially leaves a lot of "tapes' mostly empty and is kinda a waste of an expensive resource. I can work around this by disabling auto-flush...doing a bunch of backups over the course of several days until I have at least 2TB on the holding disk, then mounting a "tape" and doing a flush...problem is then it requires me to manual monitor it which I'd like to avoid... I've read all of the discussions on using vtapes, but they all center on using a fix mounted drive (or multiple drives in RAID). So I certainly could create 200 10GB vtapes on a 2TB drive, but I really need a total of 20TB of backup capacitiy...how do I setup vtapes on 20 different drives, but I only have the "slot" capacity to have 5 of them physically mounted at any given time. Bottom-line, I'm unclear on how I could use a vtape approach with MULTIPLE physical disks. I don't want to do RAID as I want the ability to migrate some of these backups offsite...doing vtapes on RAID would seem to signficantly complicate that process. Thoughts? [/code] +---------------------------------------------------------------------- |This was sent by [email protected] via Backup Central. |Forward SPAM to [email protected]. +----------------------------------------------------------------------
