| Thermodyne |
April 14th, 2006 08:23 PM |
Re: PBW in the market for some new hardware
IDE drives are cheaper than tape if you add the cost of the hardware. Not to mention how much faster it is. In bulk, IDE is about 30 cents a gig, and it costs about $100 bucks to add 4 controllers to a system (8 drives). You don’t need a big iron server to run it, so you can set it up on an old box or a low end new box. You can raid 5 800+ gigs for less than a grand on an existing box. A tape picker and tape will cost three time that much and be slower to write/read to. And the most troublesome piece of hardware in the datacenter is the tape picker. They break if you just give it a harsh look. Down side is that you have to handle drives with care when transporting them off site. But you can get padded carry cases now. You just pull the drive racks and slide them right into the case. Many shops are moving to IDE backups, they run automated IDE backups during off peak hours and then write to tape from the backup server during business hours. That way if the picker acts up during business hours, there are people there to give it some TLC. No more walking in at 6 AM Monday and finding out that the picker hung on the second tape Friday night. Some shops are also using DPM to keep almost real time copies. In the past, SCSI costs made this an expensive luxury. But with IDE being so cheap, you just add some disks for redundancy and swap them out long before they reach the end of the MTtF. And instead of lugging 20 tapes out the door every day, you carry 4 drives. It also makes life nice when you need to restore a file in some high echelon PITA’s home folder. It takes way to long to pull a single file from tape, with IDE, its much quicker. If you can swing DPM, restoring a file takes seconds. |
