On 5 Mar 2009, at 20:15, Andrew Harford wrote:
Hey,
This came up on IRC yesterday, just thought it might be worth mentioning here.
Severus (our backup machine), is going to be hosted in over in CSD soon, so is it worth keeping a second backup machine in the room aswell?
Another severus would cost about €3k, so we have to do it for less than that.
We have a p4 poweredge tower we bought to do desktop machine type stuff, but it has two 500gb disks and a raid controller, so we could buy another 2 disks for about €120. In raid 5 that would give us 1.5tb - severus is currently using 800gb, so 1.5tb should provide enough space based on our current usage.
Is it worth doing this?
I think so. A couple of years ago, the plan/hope was to have one set of backups on our network, and another set in a different physical location. Reasoning: * Fast access to backups for recovery purposes - both in terms of network speed (yay, gig-e!) and physical access. * Easy to give users NFS access to their backups, no futzing about with VPNs or remote NFS mounts. * Remote backups are slower to access (network, physical) but physically safer as they're out of the building. For 120 euro, I can't see why we wouldn't want to do this. It's up to you guys whether the work involved is worth the return.