On Wed, 24 Jun 2009, Greg wrote:
I am working on a san with several tbs of storage with iscsi for
esxi server for my company. We have decided what we want and how to
go about it however a little detail may throw a wrench in this whole
thing. How do people go about backups for this amount of storage in
a live environment. I was thinking tapes but that will get pricey
real quick. I could use snapshots, however if some catastrophic
thing happens say the server is in a fire (I know bad example but
you catch my drift) snapshots are completely useless(I believe I am
right?) I also thought about a High availability configuration,
however off site would be a pain, it is doable but we would then
need a Colo. I could do a non raided nas or san that it is backed up
to with cheap hardware but that seems finicky as well. If anyone
could point me in the right direction that would be terrific.
The only way to protect from fire or some other local disaster is to
send your backups off site.
As you say, tapes are pricey and troublesome. A good solution for you
is a backup server using the ZFS filesystem and fitted with a number
(e.g. 8) of large SATA disks and using raidz2 and lzjb or gzip
compression. You would use rsync to transfer any changes to this
server on a daily basis, and use zfs snapshots to capture a daily
snapshot of those changes so you can retrieve files from any day of
the year. When this backup server eventually fills up, you set it to
read-only and build a new backup server using the latest cheap
technologies. Ideally the backup server should be as far away as
possible from the systems being backed-up and be in a secure location.
Since hardware (and your facility) can't be trusted, you can backup
some snapshots to eSATA or USB drives on a periodic (e.g. monthly)
basis and take them off-site. For this you can use zfs as well, using
two drives in a mirror configuration in case one drive should fail.
If you need really long-term backups there are really only two
approaches which are reasonable and they depend on the needs and
capabilities of your organization:
* Use backup tapes and store them in a climate-controlled storage
facilty.
* Maintain the backed up data on a highly reliable storage server
which becomes increasingly larger, migrating data to new storage
media before the old media is anticipated to fail.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
_______________________________________________
storage-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
