Man of Honour
- Joined
- 30 Jun 2005
- Posts
- 9,515
- Location
- London Town!
So, this one is bothering me today...
I have a platform which has 8TB of storage directly attached (in the form of 2 HP MSA20 arrays loaded with 500GB drives).
It also has a backup array attached which is another MSA20 with 8TB (though this time it's loaded with 1TB drives so I get 8TB in one enclosure).
The next bit is simple, I need to replicate all the data from the primary to backup array once a day during a specific time frame. Or all the changes more properly, time wise this isn't a problem, even using robocopy once it's initially synced it manages to copy a full day's changes in the window available.
At present the legacy (very legacy, it wasn't me!) way we do this is a script to run robocopy from scheduled tasks. Now while this is, functional at the most basic level, I'd prefer something a bit, well, more elegant. I've played with replacing robocopy with the multithreaded fast copy instead which improves the speed but not the reliability.
Now much as I'd prefer to do it with a SAN that's not something that's going to happen at these sites in the near future. So we must use the existing storage. I've had a few ideas...
DFS - A strange idea forming in my head about using DFS to replicate the local volume, which in theory I like as it fits most of my requirements but I'm not a DFS expert - is it even possible...
Windows software RAID - not wildly keen as I know what performance can be like and it would make the copying real time rather than in a scheduled window as I'd prefer. Not out of the question though, I think it would affect performance too much though.
Anything else, I suspect hardware RAID of *** arrays is out due to the way they work and present themselves (they're running on HP Smartarray 6404 controllers though).
How would you do it?
I have a platform which has 8TB of storage directly attached (in the form of 2 HP MSA20 arrays loaded with 500GB drives).
It also has a backup array attached which is another MSA20 with 8TB (though this time it's loaded with 1TB drives so I get 8TB in one enclosure).
The next bit is simple, I need to replicate all the data from the primary to backup array once a day during a specific time frame. Or all the changes more properly, time wise this isn't a problem, even using robocopy once it's initially synced it manages to copy a full day's changes in the window available.
At present the legacy (very legacy, it wasn't me!) way we do this is a script to run robocopy from scheduled tasks. Now while this is, functional at the most basic level, I'd prefer something a bit, well, more elegant. I've played with replacing robocopy with the multithreaded fast copy instead which improves the speed but not the reliability.
Now much as I'd prefer to do it with a SAN that's not something that's going to happen at these sites in the near future. So we must use the existing storage. I've had a few ideas...
DFS - A strange idea forming in my head about using DFS to replicate the local volume, which in theory I like as it fits most of my requirements but I'm not a DFS expert - is it even possible...
Windows software RAID - not wildly keen as I know what performance can be like and it would make the copying real time rather than in a scheduled window as I'd prefer. Not out of the question though, I think it would affect performance too much though.
Anything else, I suspect hardware RAID of *** arrays is out due to the way they work and present themselves (they're running on HP Smartarray 6404 controllers though).
How would you do it?