Thank you all for responding, now that I'm making my late return to the party. All of these solutions provide some interesting things for me to think about. The DiskXtender solution is very attractive given our EMC commitment, but it still begs the question of creating the SLA's, categorizing the data etc. David, I think you have an interesting sounding, low-cost tiered solution and again the only part that scares me a bit is that everyone will need to understand something about how the system works. I'm sure you have this problem too, but I've found that my biggest space abusers (e.g., the person who keeps 8000 messages in his Exchange Deleted folder) are the ones who have the biggest problems comprehending anything about storage. Everyone has confirmed my aversion to optical storage. I'm going to go over some of these ideas with my network guy and try to hammer out something that resembles a policy. Thanks again.
Chuck On 8/31/06, Matthew P. Stevens <mstevens at adventuresci.com> wrote: > http://software.emc.com/products/software_az/diskxtender_for_windows.htm > ?hlnav=T > > An interesting software solution I am considering from EMC. > ... > -----Original Message----- > From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of > Tom A. > > We finally gave up on DVD storage and are exclusively using disk based > solutions for data (or images). ... > After searching high and low for a good Backup software package, it > dawned on me that > Roxio Toast has a backup utility called Deja Vu, which I ignored for > a long time. I gave it a > spin and I have not looked back. ... > On Aug 31, 2006, at 9:50 AM, David Marsh wrote: > ... > > I use disk based backup with a 10 cartridge rotation. The entire > > tree is > > backed up daily. Using commodity IDE (or SATA) hard disks is very cost > > effective. Blows tape systems out of the water regarding cost, speed, > > random access, flexibility. But a single tier system like this will > > inevitably run out of space eventually, so I'm looking to develop a > > more > > sophisticated model. > > > > My current line of thinking is to retain the single tree for > > simplicity. > > Users (all of them ...not just the technophiles) need to understand > > something before they can use it. I'm intending to add a separate > > archive area. This will be on a separate disk volume. The main > > directory > > tree will be scanned nightly, and any file not even looked at for, > > say, > > 6 months will be moved to the archive in an identical directory > > path. It > > will probably be made read-only. I may provide users direct access to > > it, and that would stop them modifying the contents. I want that data > > static. > > > > Right now I'm thinking of maintaining 3 copies of the archive. > > That's a > > big deal, as with the 10 cartridge rotation on the main directory > > tree, > > we need 10 GB of media for every 1 GB of working space. That really > > holds us back from exploiting cheap disk space to the fullest. With > > this > > archive system, we'll only need 3, so all things being equal we'll > > have > > 3 (ok, 3.33...) times the archive space on the same hardware > > budget. The > > three, rotating copies will be 1 online, 1 physically secure on-sight > > and one in a safety deposit box (size 2) at the bank we do our cash > > run > > with.
