Ralf Gross wrote: > Arno Lehmann schrieb: >> 27.11.2009 13:23, Ralf Gross wrote: >>> [crosspost to -users and -devel list] >>> >>> Hi, >>> >>> we are happily using bacula since a few years and already backing up >>> some dozens of TB (large video files) to tape. >>> >>> In the next 2-3 years the amount of data will be growing to 300+ TB.
I guess my first question is how fast will that ramp up be? LTO-5 is set to hit the market next year, with one vendor already doing a pre-order deal where they sell you LTO-4 (I assume for way more than it's worth) then upgrade you to LTO-5 when the drives become available. I presume that's a really bad headache in the making but I could see upgrading to LTO-5 in many data centers by early 2011. Could you make do until that time with copies going to multiple home-brewed raid arrays in different buildings so you can copy the data to disk and then back it up to tape later? >>> We are looking for some very pricy solutions for the primary storage >>> at the moment (NetApp etc). But we (I) are also looking if it is >>> possible to go on with the way we store the data right now. Which is >>> just some large raid arrays and backup2tape. >> Good luck... while I agree that SAN/NAS appliances tend to look >> expensive, they've got their advantages when your space has to grow to >> really big sizes. Managing only one setup, when some physical disk >> arrays work together is one of these advantages. > > I fully agree. But this comes with a price that is 5-10 time higher > than a setup with simple RAID arrays and a large changer. In the end > I'll present 2 or 3 concepts and others will decide how valuable the > data is. > I recently saw this article http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=23765 If you need high performance that would be a lousy solution but if you just need high capacity, you could probably get awesome performance for those "occasional" reads with more RAM. What I mean is that this might be a great place to put a 2nd copy of the data but you wouldn't be able to back it up entirely to tape in a reasonable backup window. However if you only need to read a single 5-10 GB file off it every couple hours, the performance should be really good. With the price difference between something like this and a SAN it seems like it might be worth it for some big shops to try to 3 or more way redundancy as you'd still come out way ahead. Of course if you were trying to do video editing right off it or an enormous database with a lot of reads/searches/writes you'd probably be pulling your hair out a lot. Other than that the only downside I see is that you have to take it down to swap out a dead drive. Proper cooling and modern drives should give this thing decent reliability, but you'd want additional layers of redundancy to allow for offline swapping of parts, software/firmware upgrades, etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
