RE: [gentoo-server] Backup Software (Long)

[Mark Schoonover]

<snip>

>
>Also, this is slightly off topic, but I figured it's a good
>time to ask.
>How do ya'll manage your storage?  Do you use NAS', SANs', or direct
>attached storage?

My company just went through this over the last few months. Our old system
was a single server with 1TB of raid5... Mostly it worked very well - we
used an external backup server running W2K, Brightstor and an Exabyte 215A
library... For the most part this setup worked well, until we lost our
redundant power supply and it toasted a partition... Upon trying to restore
the 50 GB or so of data, it took over 26 hours to restore. Then we found
out, Brightstor did not like MySQL! It would backup the tables, but would
not restore them. After several days, we figured out there was a bug in one
of the patches, and upon reinstalling Brightstor from virgin CDs we were
able to get all the data back. Shortly after that, my boss told me to never
let this happen again, no matter the cost....

Took a look at Dell SANs - made by EMC... For what we need in disk space,
our initial quote came in at 65K! Needless to say, that was way out of the
park! So, I designed a poor mans SAN, AKA NAS... We purchased a Backup
Monster from Aberdeen -
http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/Stirling-X38sa.htm. The only changes we
made to it was to install a 2nd SATA card. With 8x250GB SATA cards, Gentoo,
we set up a raid0+1. HW raid handling the striping, and the OS handling the
mirroring... This NAS will be on its own private GB network. Add in the cost
of a 3Com 12 port GB switch to connect all the servers. This NAS will only
run samba/nfs, nothing else.

The front end servers will all be IBMs to handle LAMP, and various user
directories. Will also run Gentoo, Samba/nfs. This is our main
file/application server. A 2nd identical IBM will be set up as a hot spare
using heartbeat...

There's also a backup server running with an additional 1TB of disk space.
We take an rsync snapshot of all the servers every other hour. This system
has also been configured identically as the IBMs and the NAS. If all those
go down, this system can be brought online and start serving clients.
Needless to say, it won't be anywhere as fast as the other systems! This
backup system has the library attached so we can make offsite backups. The
primary backup is this backups server, and we use it to recover accidentally
deleted files, or any other problem that may happen to the NAS.

So, there you go. I know it's not as fast as a true SAN, but we've invested
maybe $15K to implement. We used to be a RH house, this was our first
project using Gentoo... I really think using Gentoo made our lives much
easier. I can't imagine trying to do this with RH. I know it can probably be
done, but it would have been much more work to accomplish the same thing.

HTH

.mark