Best Large External Server Storage?

Diakatarnis · 21 Feb 2008 at 13:35

Right I'm looking for a external storage solution for a client, as they have a database that is growing at 200mb a day. They still have about 30gb left on the server but for the future we will need to offload the database onto an external sotrage solution.

Which method would be thebest bet?

Has to be Raid 5

ESata?
NAS (somthing like the Buffalo Terrastation)
E Scsi

I've been looking at the HP Scsi systems but your looking at £1600 for the system then £300 per drive and then the controller card so it works out very expensive and i doubt they would liek that (although we would :rolleyes:

)

Any ideas? open to all. Criteria is:

External
Raid 5 capable
Hot swappable drives.

Spank you

HEADRAT · 21 Feb 2008 at 14:07

If this is for a "commercial" organistation then you shouldn't be using "consumer" level equipment.

It's your job to "educate" this user what the failure/loss of their data would mean to their business, for many organisations the loss of their data would be crippling and threaten their business continuity

Diakatarnis · 21 Feb 2008 at 16:33

Indeed they WILL either do as suggested or risk their business because they wanted to save money.

HEADRAT · 21 Feb 2008 at 16:42

Yep, very short sighted of them, document your recommendations and get them to sign off on them.

Some people will never learn, worse still is people that won't be educated.

rpstewart · 21 Feb 2008 at 17:00

200Mb a day of growth is well beyond consumer level kit, it's getting to the point of enterprise level kit even.

There's far more to this than just shuffling the data off onto an external data store. 53Gb for a year's data is going to take some serious grunt at the server end to deal with queries. For example my current client has about that much data but the database engine is running on a 10CPU LPAR of an IBM P595 with 24Gb of RAM.

When you go above a few Gb you need to start seriously looking at database optimisation or the thing will just grind to a halt. A single RAID5 array for example is not the way to go with large DBs, you need to look at splitting the data and logs onto separate arrays for a start and then possibly splitting the data into multiple tablespaces each on their own drive/array as well.

Have they thought about how to recover 50+Gb of data? Backing that up will be fun in your budget is tight.