File Server Required for £500

PiKe · 16 May 2006 at 19:31

Our office requires a File Server with redundancy for about £500 or a little more.

We could do with a RAID array that has hotswap functionality but if it pushes it too far over budget then we can do without.

Tape would be the best option to back up whats on the server but it's simply too expensive and we would need an autoloader because we will eventually have several hundred gigabytes of information.

Any suggestions.

daven1986 · 16 May 2006 at 20:42

you could put 4x 250gb drives in a raid1 configuration?
then just get a cheap mobo, cpu etc. et voila!

daven

zetec452 · 16 May 2006 at 20:44

Your on a different planet if you expect anything decent for 500 squid.

Even a very very low end HP ML310 with hardware raid will be 600 squid ish.

Is it a mission critical?

PiKe · 16 May 2006 at 21:11

JonRohan said:
Is it a mission critical?

We're a photo library, each image is digitised and entered into a database, it would take say 1hour per image.

The budget is flexible but I need some idea's, I need to present something to my boss which he agree's with. He does like the idea of RAID 5 parity...

Kalsius · 16 May 2006 at 21:36

Probably scary words ahead but...

£500 just won't cut it for something as critical as business assets. The guys on here can say it from experience and I can back it up but nothing gets cash out of managements fists better than evidence. Do a risk assessment of your current storage and then do a business impact assessment of what would happen to profits/costs if you lost everything. Weigh it up and then make them realise that for mission critical or business critical information you need a proper backup plan, a proper budget and proper equipment to successfully implement a storage solution that covers your ass. Which in IT is what everyone tries to do...

An EXTREMELY simplified example (before someone tries to hack my hoolihans off)...

If you lost your images and it would cost the company £15,000 in lost income and cost for recovery and you figure that kind of catastrophic loss would occur maybe once every 3 years (e.g flood) then you need to invest £5k per year on mitigating that risk. If you can back this up with evidence such as guidance from the DTI etc on business impact and business continuity planning it will go down a lot better.

Then again, your boss may think £500 is the best way in his expert opinion and you accept the risk... Just keep the emails burned to DVD when bad things happen!!

PiKe · 16 May 2006 at 21:41

See what we currently use is 3 Onetouch II drives, one died this morning which raised this question of a better backup.

Even though the drive failed to be recognised anymore by the machine, we clone the disk onto an identical drive at 16:45 each day so we suffored no loss at all. But then it became questionable how long the others would last, it may of been an isolated issue but it does cast doubt in your mind.

With hard drives I would expect the mechanicals to wear out long before anything else but aparently the interface on this particular drive died.

Now I realise that tape is the ultimate backup but how much are we talking for a tape backup and 300gig of tape?

Energize · 16 May 2006 at 21:47

Tape = slow, old, unreliable

Id just get blu-ray.

What sort of scale is the pc going to be used for exactly? A lot of people use old P3s as fileservers, its not exactly power demanding unless you have hundreds of users.

andyfield · 16 May 2006 at 21:52

Energize said:
Tape = slow, old, unreliable

Id just get blu-ray.

What sort of scale is the pc going to be used for exactly? A lot of people use old P3s as fileservers, its not exactly power hungry.

We use LTO 2 tapes at work and I'm pretty sure they push 30-40MB sec at least so hardly slow. Unreliable, I don't think we'd be storing FTSE100 backups on unrelaible media, especially with FSA regulations etc....

/edit: Think our tape drives are about £2K for a decent HP twin tape setup. Not sure how much tapes cost as I don't order them.... The tapes we use are 200 uncompressed, 400 compressed (ish).

Yeah blu ray is right up there for business backup solutions

Kalsius · 16 May 2006 at 21:53

You are looking at it from the wrong angle, its not what the solution costs but what the cost is to your business if you DO lose the data. That determines your budget and then your solution.

I don't know anything about the business you are in so I can't help more than provide a guiding direction.... Like you say tape may seem to be best but with large tapes comes cost and recovery time isn't all that fast, those may be factors in your decision making. There are NAS solutions out there which may fit the bill for you but again until you know the value of what you are protecting, making a sound decision on what to spend and what solution to implement is taking a stab in the dark.

If you want an idea of pricing for enterprise solutions you can try the server builders on HP and Dell ( I am assuming this is okay to post as I don't believe OcUK is in the market for enterprise solution design....

). You can go from a 1U multi drive rack mount for a thousand or so up to many thousands of pounds for the tape library systems both manufacturers offer.

Energize · 16 May 2006 at 21:54

andyfield said:
We use LTO 2 tapes at work and I'm pretty sure they push 30-40MB sec at least so hardly slow. Unreliable, I don't think we'd be storing FTSE100 backups on unrelaible media, especially with FSA regulations etc....

/edit: Think our tape drives are about £2K for a decent HP twin tape setup. Not sure how much tapes cost as I don't order them.... The tapes we use are 200 uncompressed, 400 compressed (ish).

Yeah blu ray is right up there for business backup solutions

Slow because you have to check all the data on the backup effectivley making it twice as long or halving the transfer rate, whichever way you want to look at it.

Unreliable because tapes dont tend to last that long before the tape starts wearing out and errors start happening.

andyfield · 16 May 2006 at 21:55

Energize said:
Slow because you have to check all the data on the backup effectivley making it twice as long or halving the transfer rate, whichever way you want to look at it.

Unreliable because tapes dont tend to last that long before the tape starts wearing out and errors start happening.

They're not unreliable by any means, they need maintenance but thats to be expected. I think we back up many terrabytes per evening and the only thing that can cope with that is either SAN snapshots offsite or tape (library in our case)

Have you worked doing any enterprise backup, I'm far from an expert but have working knowledge....

Kalsius · 16 May 2006 at 21:55

It all depends, if you have huge tapes and can afford the time to recover specific data then tape may be an option, proper tape management procedures inline with ITIL guidance gets around media wear and tear. If you need data to be always available you have to look at resilient online backup using something like a NAS.

Saying that we could be going way overboard here on the enterprise solution angle

Energize · 16 May 2006 at 21:58

andyfield said:
They're not unreliable by any means, they need maintenance but thats to be expected. I think we back up many terrabytes per evening and the only thing that can cope with that is either SAN snapshots offsite or tape (library in our case)

Have you worked doing any enterprise backup, I'm far from an expert but have working knowledge....

£500 server budget, its not enterprise its a small office by sounds of things, and a backup solution like that is a little overkill. For a couple of hundred gigs of data, costwise optical or external hdds are a better idea.

Kalsius · 16 May 2006 at 21:59

Even small offices can have critical data worth many thousands of pounds in profits/costs/losses, a £500 budget seems insignificant if there is a large impact with loss.

Energize · 16 May 2006 at 22:02

Kalsius said:
Even small offices can have critical data worth many thousands of pounds in profits/costs/losses, a £500 budget seems insignificant if there is a large impact with loss.

If there was going to be a big loss its unlikely that they are going to be spending £500 on important equipment, either way optical is more reliable that tape and for the amount of data being handled here, it seems a much more practical solution.

andyfield · 16 May 2006 at 22:02

Indeed, read a few more stories about data loss. Last one I remember reading stated that after any major data loss, most SME's will go under within the year.

Backup and business continuity should have a reasonable budget. If all those hard drive backups went you'd feel a bit vulnerable. All you'd need to do is accidentally put it near something magnetic (no difference to tapes but you're likely to be more careful with them).

/edit: No way optical is more reliable than a well thought out tape backup routine. Also not practical based upon the storage he needs (several hundred GB, whats that about 15 blu ray disks per day

)

If I were you I'd recommend RAID 5 SCSI hot swap disks for the server, poss RAID 1 for the OS. Then some form of tape backup solution. You can always get a single tape drive then upgrade to a double. Then progress onto an autoloader when you need more than 4/500 GB backed up per night.

Energize · 16 May 2006 at 22:04

With the magnetic shielding hdds have, your going to need a really big magnet. Anyway optical backups dont just fail, they dont have any moving parts and last over 100 years.

andyfield · 16 May 2006 at 22:06

Energize said:
With the magnetic shielding hdds have, your going to need a really big manget.

Ok how about someone dropped the drives, head meets platter and damages the disk that way, not unreasonable....

Trust us, I've worked in IT for a while.

Energize · 16 May 2006 at 22:08

Yes but if the backups failed (somehow) you wouldnt be juggling the server hdds.

Kalsius · 17 May 2006 at 07:53

Hotswapping disks is nothin really, I did it for a long time when rebuilding machines with multiple drives which had to be online at the time. Hot swap SCSI takes seconds to swap out, just takes time to rebuild the arrays.

Optical is a PITA really, a good tape backup solution can easily handle a full datacentre's worth of data nightly (I know I did it =]) even capacities of Blu-Ray are never gonna come even slightly close to meeting the requirements of large scale backup which with high detail imging will definitely become a problem.

My suggestion would be to do a proper assessment, ensure you have the proper business requirements in place (and no, just saying I need backup isn't a sufficient requirement) and then make a decision as to the solution which will meet your requirements.