> > No, you really need to look at a phone bill. Mine comes every month in > > a big box which includes frame-relay and a dozen T1s. All this off-site > > over-the-wire backup sounds great until you calculate the cost of the > > WAN connections - I could buy a new tape drive every month. Backing up > > corporate data over DSL or cable lines is not realistic, upstream > > speeds are not nearly good enough. Y > So back it up to another part of the building on your local lan. > Its highly unlikely the ENTIRE CAMPUS will burn down, and if it > does you have far greater problems, as well as a collection of > melted tapes.
Floods, tornadoes, etc... If the entire campus is the size of one city block, it isn't very hard to imagine at all. And there are legal requirements as well, either contractual or regulatory - on more businesses than realize it (most are either ignorant or just pray they don't get caught with their pants down). Take a look at how many urban centers are actually in flood plains; I think you'll be surprised. And you are wrong in that backups are only for recovering from destroyed data/equipment. Backups are archival, you may need them for research, audits, and legal action. Most of the times in my career I've restored from backup has not been because of failure of software or hardware but because someone wanted/needed to see a point-in-time or access to data that was expunged. A briefcase (24) of LTO-2 tapes is 4,800Gb, that is 7 750Gb drives (with no redundancy, and not including filesystem overhead). Since most shops have close to 100 tapes thats 20,000Gb or 27 750Gb drives (with no redundancy and not including filesystem overhead) - it certainly doesn't seem convenient to me or cost effective. If you have all these online you are also going to need an expensive enclosure to cool and power them all. Then if you put it remote you need the bandwidth.... in no way do those numbers come out ahead of tape. > Much as you protest, this is where the industry is going. Pure conjecture. I do see movement to SANs with remote replication - but that is redundancy, not backup. Data still has to be archived in a rotational fashion - it just has to be, period. And I am seeing no one doing that with disk. The only way to avoid that is to have truly massive off-site storage, which almost no medium sized company can afford. > Disk drives are falling in price each year. Yep, so? > Tape solutions always seem to cost as much as the computer that > they are attached to. You are buying really cheap servers. > Disk technology is in the field, inexpensive, and robust. > Even for small shop something like this might do: > http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=270 > Want network attach: See this one: > http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=279&language=en Don't send me links to adds. Adds of course put a positive spin on stuff, that is what adds are for. Not to mention this is $500 and only provides the storage it has inside - no way does this compete with a tape drive; it is equivalent to 5 tapes; so most shops I visit would need at least 20 of these. -- -- Adam Tauno Williams Network & Systems Administrator Consultant - http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com Developer - http://www.opengroupware.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
