Doug, I suspect you are going to get a ton of positive responses here. We are a UD on Redhat shop so I can't answer your other questions except to say it is rock solid. One of things that makes linux so fast is its disk caching - don't go short of ram for your server.
However... > > Also while this is not really pick related does anyone have any > experience with "flash copy" on linux/red hat? It allows us to unmount > file systems and 'flash copy" the data to another area and the remount > the file system and then make a backup from the "flash copy" area. > > Linux has a logical volume manager built in. The LVM allows you to do everything you would expect around file system management but you also get snapshots out of the box. These are the same copy-on-write snapshot method you get in SANs. They are very fast and work well. Standard process we use to take the snapshot is... sync - flush pending writes to disk dbpause - UV equivalent anyway, sync - once more to flush any writes. take snapshot dbresume The database is usually quiesced for less than a second and because you are not unmounting - you can do it several times during the business day with no user interruption. Your RHCE will be able to advise and set this up quickly. We then rsync the snapshot off to a DR machine somewhere - rsync will be your new best-friend here. We then destroy the snapshot so there is no overhead. The standard rule of thumb for the amount of disk for the snapshot itself is 10% of the source filesystem but YMMV depending on the time it takes to do the rsync. With the LVM you can dynamically grow the space anyway. One last comment. While lots of people do their own thing with linux and their own installs (I do for my home backup, http cache server) - the higher level stuff can be harder and I can't emphasize enough the importance of involving a good RHCE in the project and ideally keep them on an ongoing basis. RHCE is a tough certification and our support contract specifies RHCEs work on our systems for anything non-trivial. Regards, Adrian Auckland, NZ ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
