Emmanuel Florac put forth on 6/18/2010 9:04 AM: > Le Fri, 18 Jun 2010 07:55:14 -0500 > Stan Hoeppner <stan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> écrivait: > >> Since he already has a FC SAN, going with something like a 4Gb FC >> Nexsan Sataboy w/16 1TB drives would be a better option. > > Why not, actually anything that could hold a backup will do :) That really depends on the size of one's filesystem(s) to be backed up and the required backup schedule. Backup times, optimal configurations: 10TB FS 20TB FS 40TB FS 4Gb FC 7 hours 14 hours 28 hours 1GbE NFS 28 hours 56 hours 111 hours With 4Gb FC one could backup 40TB in just over a day. Using a 1GbE NAS filer it would take 4.6 days, almost an entire standard business _week_. Now, depending on the data, one could always tar the FS with compression and substantially decrease these wire xfer times with either FC or NAS, which most OPs would probably do with given the FS sizes involved. And this is where the really nice high end arrays start to be worth their price tag. Even some upper midrange arrays, both SAN and NAS, have PIT snapshot and LUN mirroring backup capabilities. Both operations are much faster than a filesystem level backup over the wire. The DS4700 offers both a PIT snapshot feature called "FlashCopy" and a LUN mirroring feature called "Volume Copy". It would seem in the OP's case that making use of the DS4700's Volume Copy feature would be of great benefit. He would simply make a Volume Copy of the current LUN holding the processed seismic data using the System Storage DS4000 Storage Manager software. He should be able to schedule this operation to occur nightly, every other day, weekly, biweekly, etc, or he could just run it manually occasionally if the dataset doesn't change after it's been processed. Again, given the OP's SAN hardware, this is really the only way to fly in this case. -- Stan _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs