Jeff, that's a good point. I appreciate you bringing it up.
From: Jeff Steward [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 11:24 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN question Isn't that the truth. Another piece of advice on disaster recovery and service contracts: There is a world of difference between a "4 hour call to response" contract and a "4 hour call to repair" contract. In the first instance you can be DAYS waiting on parts, in the second you can be drinking coffee while a tech is replacing the guts of your tape library within a few hours. -Jeff Steward On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 11:17 AM, Andrew S. Baker <[email protected]> wrote: Oh, I understood that you meant that. But I have seen too many times that the focus is on backup: making the windows, saving space, compressing data, etc. And very little consideration is made to getting it all back into place, and reintegrating the saved data with existing data. Even backup applications which talk about speed rarely mean "restore speed" ASB On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Raper, Jonathan - Eagle <[email protected]> wrote: ASB, thanks for clarifying…. Didn’t you hear what I MEANT?! ☺ Jonathan L. Raper, A+, MCSA, MCSE Technology Coordinator Eagle Physicians & Associates, PA [email protected] www.eaglemds.com ________________________________________ From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 11:01 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN question Backup AND Recovery. Trust me, the second one won't work without the first, but the second is done poorly, you'll still have lots of grief and pain... ASB (My XeeSM Profile) Exploiting Technology for Business Advantage... On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 10:57 AM, Raper, Jonathan - Eagle <[email protected]> wrote: +100,000,000 Who cares about your High Availability & redundancy if you don’t have a *ROCK_SOLID_BACKUP_PLAN*. You need these books: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/701 Curtis *KNOWS* his stuff, and you (as well as all the rest of us, if we haven’t already) would benefit from his knowledge and experience on the subject, less we experience an RGE… [1] HTH… Jonathan L. Raper, A+, MCSA, MCSE Technology Coordinator Eagle Physicians & Associates, PA [email protected] www.eaglemds.com [1] Resume Generating Event ________________________________________ From: Jeff Steward [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 10:49 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN question What is your current backup solution? -Jeff Steward On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 10:21 AM, John Aldrich <[email protected]> wrote: Well, my (admittedly limited) understanding is that at the low-end SANs have a lot of overlap with NAS and that they are almost interchangeable. I want some sort of separate machine to get the "file server" role off the DCs. Maybe that means a NAS, maybe it means a SAN, maybe it means a server with DAS running Windows Storage Server. At this point, I'm not really sure what the best money would be. Whatever we get, I want it to be expandable so that as we (hopefully) grow, we can add more storage as needed. I do like the idea of having tape to back up whatever we have. If we're going to have email in-house, we're likely to end up with at least a couple terabytes of data in the long run, so whatever archival backup we end up with is likely to need to be a library, instead of just an on-board tape drive. From: Kevin Lundy [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 9:12 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN question And absolutely none of that requires a SAN. Especially for your data set size. Why do you think you need a SAN? versus NAS? versus well architechted DAS with decent tape? On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 8:37 AM, John Aldrich <[email protected]> wrote: I want to ensure that the data integrity remains intact, even if it takes a couple days to recover. This is business-critical data, although we could live without it for a couple or three days, it would be very difficult and time consuming to recreate much of the data on the servers. For this reason, I want redundant disks, network, controllers, etc. I believe I previously mentioned that my CEO told me we could live with taking up to 3 or 4 days to recover the data, but after that, it would be problematic. Personally, I'd like to get it down to under 48 hours to recover (not 4 business days, 48 actual hours.) That's why I want redundant controllers or if I can't get redundant controllers on the storage appliance itself, I want redundant storage appliances, such that the data itself is redundant. I would not like to have to go to the CEO and tell him "sorry, we lost the data because the system crashed and we had no backups." Theoretically, I could have one "appliance" and a tape library and be good, but I'd prefer to have it a *little* more robust than that. -----Original Message----- From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 12:12 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN question > set up in some way that there's lots of redundancy Data redundancy? Disk redundancy? Controller redundancy? Site redundancy? Link redundancy?... If the answers to any of the above are "yes", to what degree? You can go nuts with this stuff... as has been mentioned before, what are your business requirements driving this architecture? -sc > -----Original Message----- > From: John Aldrich [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 3:28 PM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: SAN question > > Well, I *would* like to get the storage off the domain controllers and have it > set up in some way that there's lots of redundancy. I suppose I could buy a > Microsoft Storage Server with a couple terabytes of disk space and use that. > > > > From: Bill Humphries [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 3:14 PM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: Re: SAN question > > Yeah, my vote is for DAS. You have a simple network that doesn't have to be > complex. A carpet company isn't some startup or tech company that will > change radically in a short period of time. The only way things radically > change there is if Shaw or Mohawk come knocking at the door...then you > have different problems. > > Bill > > > Jeff Steward wrote: > I'm bored, I'll bite. > > Like others here, I'm not convinced you even need a SAN or even NAS. You > can probably make use of DAS. > > To even begin to make an attempt to give you more guidance we need: > > How many users will be hitting the file server. > What type of file i/o are we talking about? Have you benchmarked your > current performance? How much storage do you currently have and how > much do you think you will need to meet anticipated growth over the next 24 > to 36 months. > > If you move to providing in-house Exchange, how many users will you be > hosting? How many are heavy duty users versus light duty? > > That's a start, answers to those questions will help us help you further. > > -Jeff Steward > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 10:16 AM, John Aldrich > <[email protected]> wrote: > Ok, guys. I'm trying to narrow down my many choices with regards to our on- > going search for a SAN manufacturer. I'd like your thoughts on the whole > question of adding more intelligence vs just adding more disks. i.e. the EQ vs > LeftHand models. > > I can see arguments to be made for both models. I'll tell you that, initially, the > SAN is going to be a glorified file server, however, we plan on hosting our > email data store on the SAN when we bring email in-house later on. I've > already verified with the email vendor that I hope to use that this is not a > problem, so that's a non-issue. Other than that, the only database we would > store on the SAN would possibly be the database from our Vipre install, > although initially that would stay on the local storage. > > So, I'd like to see some discussions of the benefits of just adding a tray of > "dumb drives" or adding a complete controller along with the drives (a la > LeftHand.) > > I just don't know enough about the benefits of each model to know what > would work best for us. I'm hoping that you guys who are more experienced > would give me the benefit of your knowledge. > > > > Thanks, > John Aldrich > IT Manager, > Blueridge Carpet > 706-276-2001, Ext. 2233 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
