We decided against NetApp for the same reasons, and went with Metastor. Performance
is great, easy to upgrade, and it fit our needs for a reasonable price vs using
seperate file stores for each mail server. I'm sure there are other brands out
there of similar price/performance (we spent maybe 15k for 36gig raid 5, 3 hot
drives, 1 hot spare, and 6 empty slots for new)
For backups I have tape connected to a seperate scsi channel on the NFS server
which has the raid box.
--
Stephen Comoletti
Systems Administrator
Delanet, Inc. http://www.delanet.com
ph: (302) 326-5800 fax: (302) 326-5802
Tim Tsai wrote:
> What do you guys do for backup's? Do you put two NIC cards in each
> server and maintain a separate network for that?
>
> Thanks, from a guy that's about to take that big plunge into a scalable
> mail design.
>
> Tim
>
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2000 at 02:56:59AM -0800, Tracy R Reed wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 15, 2000 at 09:41:48AM -0600, Tim Tsai wrote:
> > > Russ, what is your definition of a "large" installation? 10k, 100k, 1m
> > > users? Just exactly how many lighter-weight servers is practical to
> > > manage and upkeep before it's cheaper to buy NetApp's?
> >
> > As someone who has purchased and maintained a lot of NetApp hardware over the
> > last year let me tell you that NetApp is heinously expensive. The head unit
> > alone usually goes for around $50k. Then add disks. We have since ditched the
> > NetApp solution and re-architected things to use clusters of PC's. We are much
> > happier with the cost effectiveness and the reliability. Of course we aren't
> > using them for mail but I can think of ways to distribute a large mail load on
> > cheap PC's.
