Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:

>>> I indeed use iSCSI.
>>> The storage is on the SAN, and it's accessible via iSCSI.
>>> BackupPC itself runs as a Xen guest.
>> Is there some point to splitting the box where backuppc runs and its 
>> storage?  I'd expect it to be faster/cheaper to shove some big SATA 
>> drives in a so-so PC box with a lot of RAM.  And even better if the box 
>> has something else to keep it busy in the day time.
> 
> Actually regular servers which can have more than 4 drives tend to be 
> pretty expensive.

How big does a single archive have to be?  I'm somewhat fanatic about 
keeping it on a single disk myself so that I can software-mirror to a 
drive that is rotated offsite.   My current version is using one of these:
http://www.startech.com/Product/ItemDetail.aspx?productid=HSB320SATBK&c=US
replacing the 2 5" bays in a desktop machine with 2 disks permanently 
mirrored and a pair of extra drives that I rotate in the 3rd slot. The 
OS runs on separate internal drives. I also have a USB->SATA adapter so 
I can mount the offsite drive in a laptop if needed for immediate access.

I'm using 750 gig drives now because they are cheap and will complete 
the mirror copy in a couple of hours, but you could go to at least a gig 
on a single drive these days - and you avoid the overhead of raid5 this way.


> Running BackupPC as a Xen guest has the advantage that you can use 
> resources of the server better - as IO on the SAN holding backup is a 
> bottleneck, you still have plenty of CPU on a Xen server for running 
> guests which are not busy most of the time.

I can understand that for software that is complicated to install, but 
backuppc is a perl script and a couple of CPAN modules...


> An you can easily migrate the guest to another (stronger) machine, 
> without any downtime or service interruption.

But it's not hard to do that with the base software either - you just 
need to have the archive self-contained and the ssh key for the backuppc 
user available.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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