[KLUG Members] RE: alternate redundancy v. cost

[Adam Tauno WIlliams]

> I would be really curious as to which NAS boxes you have been
> impressed with .... both vendor and model... 

http://www.storage.ibm.com/snetwork/nas/500/datasheet.html

Supports every OS under the sun, SSH administration, and LDAP and/or
Kerberos V authentication.

> I would assume that the
> backups would go to a tape on the DC server .... 

Or to a tape driver installed in or attached to the NAS,  even a medium
sized NAS has way to much data to backup over-the-net.

> The times they are a-changin and the best way to do things now will
> look a lot different than just a year or two ago.  

Certainly,  GFS will be in the kernel (and work) someday.  NBD already
works,  but I haven't had the kahunas to try it in production yet. 
iSCSI seems the next big thing in storage.

> I have felt for
> about a year that the age of the tape is just about dead for backup.

Yep, I keep hearing that.  But I haven't seen anything even resembling a
viable alternative.  Unless I want to keep a hundred removable drives
lying around - that certainly isn't cost effective.  And I wonder what
the MTBF will be when their life involves riding the corporate shuttle
service back and forth to the vault;  given my experience with drives
installed in laptops and my guess is: "Not long". 

And when the building burns down around them will they still work?  A
4mm or DLT tape can sit for hours at several hundred degrees (the
temperature inside a 'fire proof' vault) and come out unscathed.  Most
removable drives are in 'soft' plastic cabinets that I'd wager would
turn into a puddle at 350F - and destroy the drive inside during their
puddlefication.

Maybe a NAS in a remote facility, but then I'd need the telco to give be
a point-to-point T3 between two buildings not in the same flood plain. 
The monthly price of anything larger than a T1 is still pretty scary. 
I'm hoping metropolitan ethernet will someday be the saviour of this
solution.

> I think in smaller environments that the basic setup is going to look
> quite a bit different too ... and cheaper.

Small site perform backups?  Thats news to me! ;)