[Beowulf] Re: OT: LTO Ultrium (3) throughput?

[Jon Aquilina]

well right now i have no funding what so ever im trying to scrape together a
few machines. being from houston and going to a private institute there i
have had my ins and outs with higher education IT. i agree with what you are
saying and now it makes totally perfect sense. also in addition to off
siting the tapes from last week couldnt you take a drive out of your raid
array and store them in an off site location then reuse again for a back up
down the road?

On 7/7/08, Gerry Creager <gerry.creager at tamu.edu> wrote:
>
> Jon Aquilina wrote:
>
>> in my case where money isnt an issue wouldnt it be better for me to build
>> a raid backup array? i understand your reasoning. im still studying and
>> fairly new in the higher education of IT so when i start working ill keep
>> what you mentioned to heart. only problem is that where i am located in
>> europe things are more expensive here. another random idea why not create a
>> raided backup array backed up to tape? is it possible to do a tape back up
>> of data thata being written to disk instantly
>>
>
> It's absolutely possible to do a mirrored write to RAID spinning media and
> also to tape.  In a perfect world, where I don't have budget constraints,
> that's how I'd achieve my third tier of backup.    The real reason we bother
> with tiered storage and multiple copies, however, remains "disaster
> recovery".  One theory says that simply having two copies in the data center
> is enough.  Experience teaches that, for true disaster recovery, one needs a
> pretty recent off-site copy, that is unlikely to be disrupted by an event in
> one locale.  I know of one company that mirrors disks over 100 miles from
> their r&d/corporate offices via multiple 10gigabit paths, with two feeds for
> power, a diesel generator, and a battery plant to keep things running.  In
> their main site, they have disk and tape.  Offsite, they have another disk
> copy. And last week's tapes.
>
> In higher-education IT, one tends to have a lot of budget constraints.
> Funding agencies want accountability and don't seem to just give us hardware
> dollars for the asking, although it often seems that way when someone who's
> not seeking said funding, watches the process.  Therefore, money IS a
> problem and we have to determine the best way to keep things going while
> optimizing expenses.
>
> Different approaches don't mean we're disagreeing with you, however.  MY
> primary backup is spinning (RAID) disk.  I'd like to expand to LTO tape with
> robotics but my funding agencies have not yet seen the wisdom of this, and
> think my use of disk is just fine.  Until we have a problem (and problems
> are almost guaranteed) and get in trouble for not having incorporated tape
> (or another, different, technology) in our backup plan, I don't expect to
> see funds for it. In fact, when we do get in trouble, I see us redirecting
> already allocated funds rather than getting new funds, to accomplish this.
>  Just understand that redirecting  funding for a new hardware implementation
> requires sponsor approval, and if they don't understand "Why?" it can get
> messy.
>
> gerry
>
>  On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 5:05 AM, Steve Cousins <cousins at umit.maine.edu<mailto:
>> cousins at umit.maine.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>        From: "Jon Aquilina"
>>        this is slightly off topic but im just wondering why spend
>>        thousands of
>>        dollars when u can just setup another server and backup
>>        everything to a
>>        raided hard drive array?
>>
>>
>>    Another RAID system helps but only if it is located somewhere else.
>>    The main reason we backup is for disaster recovery. One nice thing
>>    about tape is that you can take the tapes to another location easily
>>    or put them in a fire safe.
>>
>>    Another reason is that RAID systems don't scale up as easily as a
>>    tape system. Our library has two 15 tape magazines that can be
>>    removed and replaced. It costs about $750 to buy 15 new tapes plus a
>>    magazine. That's not too bad for 6 TB of storage (uncompressed, with
>>    HW compression we get about 9 TB). Plus it takes practically no time
>>    to start using it.
>>
>>    The library wasn't really that expensive when we bought it either.
>>    Somewhere around $7500. At the time we bought that we were using 400
>>    GB drives in our RAID systems at $300 each. To build a server with 5
>>    TiB (usable) of RAID storage at the time was about $7000. The tapes
>>    were more expensive then (about $100 each) but for about $10,500 we
>>    got 12 TB of tape storage (library plus 30 tapes). To get roughly
>>    the same of disk storage would have been about $14K. So right off
>>    the bat tape was cheaper. Plus it is so much easier to manage. I
>>    like the idea of snapshots and using rsync plus links is a crafty
>>    idea but I sleep better knowing that I have a "real" (one that I can
>>    carry around) backup of our data in our safe.
>>
>>    Steve
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jonathan Aquilina
>>
>>
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>>
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>
> --
> Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
> Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
> Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
> Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
>



-- 
Jonathan Aquilina
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