Cheapest way to back up ~50TB?

[ethos]

Personally I'd be investigating getting a big fat dedicated line installed and use an online backup solution. Initial setup will take time but subsequent backups can be on an incremental basis.

Is this a serious suggestion? Please tell me it's not!!

 

[AHarvey]

If its student data and you provide the primary storage for them then I would either inform them that no backups are made and they need to back up there own

OR

Provide a backup systems but charge students an small amount a year to use it? This would enable you to backup everything AND cover costs.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

Just a question is it 1 room where this information will be accessed or is it everywhere?

I'm sorry here if I'm missing the point but if students are accessing this sort of information (30GB) accross even gigabit links theres going to be huge data link bottle necks. If files (movies/music) is few GB each and a room of lets say 24 PCS is been used ..... theres hugh problems with speed here.

I work in a college and we have issues with 1 room (Music production) alough the links arn't updated to GB but we are looking at new Apple Mac solutions and local storage as network storage is just too much and bandwidth issues occur.

Put the emphasis onto the student, give them all a 250GB USB disk. Much faster than network and cheaper!!!

I am shocked that your talking about 50TB here and not a backup solution is in the plan. I wouldn't dare touch a system where theres no solutions in place for data loss. Nasty...

 

[Messiah Khan]

Going back a bit - for a 42TB SATA Beast - depending on your relationship and how much discount you can extract, maybe £23k?

That's not too bad.

Dammm that's expensive, we managed to get one for a bit more than half of that.

And that is even better! I certainly think that falls into the land of affordable considering the overall budget of the SAN install.

depends if it does the OP out of a job by removing the management infrastructure

Don't worry about my job, network admin & user support is just small part of it. My of my time is spent being a photography/print/sound/theatre/video technician and everything else with a plug technician.

I don't think a university will be lacking bandwidth! They're normally on multiple gbit links already. I imagine the Janet network is 10gbit + by now?

For one, the facility will be off the central network, so will be accessing the internet via wireless. But more importantly, I don't think I would make myself very popular hogging the entire Janet or university network!

Just a question is it 1 room where this information will be accessed or is it everywhere?

I'm sorry here if I'm missing the point but if students are accessing this sort of information (30GB) accross even gigabit links theres going to be huge data link bottle necks. If files (movies/music) is few GB each and a room of lets say 24 PCS is been used ..... theres hugh problems with speed here.

I work in a college and we have issues with 1 room (Music production) alough the links arn't updated to GB but we are looking at new Apple Mac solutions and local storage as network storage is just too much and bandwidth issues occur.

Put the emphasis onto the student, give them all a 250GB USB disk. Much faster than network and cheaper!!!

I am shocked that your talking about 50TB here and not a backup solution is in the plan. I wouldn't dare touch a system where theres no solutions in place for data loss. Nasty...

Yeah, the facility will consist of one room split into 3 areas (Input, process and output) with a total of 38 computers. There won't be a bottleneck for our needs. We will be doing video editing off the SAN, transcoding footage into ProRes422 (1080p 25fps) which runs at about 17MBps. A gigabit connection will be more than enough for say 4 streams of footage (The Mac pros will start to struggle before we saturate the connection.) This just leaves the SAN, which we are speccing to support this sort of data rate over the 38 computers which is the main reason it is going to be rather expensive.

Anyway, the Satabeast (or equivalent. Any other suggestions are wlecome) looks very promising and should be possible for the budget.

 

[Yamahahahahaha]

Equallogic 6500E http://www.equallogic.com/products/default.aspx?id=7905
If you don't mind SATA drives.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

Yeah, the facility will consist of one room split into 3 areas (Input, process and output) with a total of 38 computers. There won't be a bottleneck for our needs. We will be doing video editing off the SAN, transcoding footage into ProRes422 (1080p 25fps) which runs at about 17MBps. A gigabit connection will be more than enough for say 4 streams of footage (The Mac pros will start to struggle before we saturate the connection.) This just leaves the SAN, which we are speccing to support this sort of data rate over the 38 computers which is the main reason it is going to be rather expensive.

Anyway, the Satabeast (or equivalent. Any other suggestions are wlecome) looks very promising and should be possible for the budget.

What sort of policies are the workstations applying? Sorry did you say they were Windows or Apple OS? Do the students log into the MACS? I find that a lot of the issues we get is login speeds, still on XP but in 6 months time upgrading to GB + WIN7 VD.

 

[Messiah Khan]

Equallogic 6500E http://www.equallogic.com/products/default.aspx?id=7905
If you don't mind SATA drives.

Thanks for the suggestion. Any idea of the price for a fully loaded one with 1TB drives?

What sort of policies are the workstations applying? Sorry did you say they were Windows or Apple OS? Do the students log into the MACS? I find that a lot of the issues we get is login speeds, still on XP but in 6 months time upgrading to GB + WIN7 VD.

There will be various policies depending on the user group, with some resetting preference files and doing cleanup duties. Nothing too intensive, and anything that does require a bit of time will be done overnight.

The server is running OSX Server, and all the clients are running OSX 10.6. Yeah all the students log in, authenticating through opendirectory.

 

[Yamahahahahaha]

Thanks for the suggestion. Any idea of the price for a fully loaded one with 1TB drives?

Depends on your relationship with Dell really! Retail prices are about £400 per 1TB drive, or £500 for 2TB drives, but you can expect significant savings (40%+) if your university buys lots of stuff from Dell.
£30,000 would be the upper limit as a reasonable guesstimation.