Gert van der Knokke wrote: > Mind this, I'm just stirring up things a bit to get some perspective > view of cost versus reliability.
Here's my AU$0.02.
We have roughly 400Gb of disk spread across 7 SMTP/IMAP/Oracle/GIS/ Web servers. We've just bought a Sun 3510 16-bay FC/SCSI RAID box to serve as a baby-SAN to 5 of the servers and will consolidate the rest. There's another 5 servers which have about half that but are squid or CDROM servers and as such don't need full backups.
Right now we back up to two DLT drives, a Mamoth, and a Mamoth2, several of them across the network to a machine with a physical drive.
This is expensive and prone to failure.
Our solution is to buy a cheap Arena PA-8211 FC/IDE RAID box, connect it to a cheap Intel/Debian server with Gb ethernet and rsync all the servers to it several times per day. We can do a final rsync then take a snapshot early AM when the rsync will be as consistant as it will get, and back that up to a 7-tape autoloader for the Mamoth2.
This is still expensive - those Mamoth2 tapes are worth their weight in gold. The chance of failure is much reduced, however.
The next stage is to buy a new tape drive, one of the new ones which does 300Gb native, which will keep us to only two tapes for a full backup. With a 5 or 10 slot autoloader, it should keep us going for maybe two years before we need to look at a new tape drive.
Since the Arena box has a maximum capacity of 3.5Tb with 250Gb disks, way above the Sun box, we intend to also take hourly/daily snapshots as each rsync is done to reduce the need for restoring from tape. (That was the on-topic LVM part of this post!)
Hey, while I have your attention, has anyone written some scripts to check free space on a number of snapshots and add PE's as needed to keep the snapshot valid, deleting the oldest as needed to free PE's?
Alternately, are there plans to add a trigger to a snapshot to do this automatically, so the script only needs to keep an eye on the total free PE's and delete the oldest snapshot as necessary? That would be *much* nicer!
Cheers, glen.
_______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
