On 10/02 02:36 , Tony Nelson wrote: > My first decision point is potentially the easiest. I thought rather > than buying one huge backup server and trying to backup all 32 hosts, it > might be smarter to buy 2 (or more) smaller machines and splitting up > the load.
I'd go along with that idea. I think most people here will concur that multiple machines scale a lot better than big machines. This is a very parallelizable problem we're dealing with. > I would think that multiple machines might cost a little more > up front, but I'm hoping I would get better throughput that way. you'll also get more redundancy; because if one machine catches fire, you still have the other. If you're really paranoid, you might even have some hosts backed up to both backup servers. is there any sense to making the backup servers physically distributed? i.e. do you have multiple server rooms or offices? Even just putting one backup server in your office, down the hall from the server room, provides physical dispersal that may save your bacon one day. (Then again, you might have a place like my first sysadmin job, where my office was the server room). > The second decision point would be vendor. Currently we buy most of our > hardware from Dell. I'm fine with Dell unless there is vendor out there > that sells boxes for a reasonable price that are hands down better for > the application (possibly because of RAID controller cards). We've gone to buying Dell hardware. Can't say we think outrageously highly of them, but everyone else sucks just as much. :) We put 3ware RAID cards in our boxes tho; the Dell SATA RAID cards are crap compared to the 3ware ones. > If I were to do RAID 10, with say > 500GB SATA drives, would a single raid controller suffice, or does it > really pay to get 2? no, just go with one. that way you can do all the RAID in hardware. Good luck! -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
