On Wed March 12 2003 06:59, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
>Can anyone tell me if they use amanda and are a large commercial
> company (> 250 employees), a hospital or a university and if so
> how much it's used (whole institution, small department, single
> server etc). How many Gb do you back up (don't answer that if you
> feel its confidential, or you don't know).
>
>I don't work in computer support but are aware there is a talk of
> buying a Veritas backup package at academic discount (around 800
> UK pounds or $1300). I wanted to know if amanda would be a viable
> option. I guess there are going to be issues bought up about
> support, stability, the importance of backups etc. I'd like to
> know of big organistations using the software and if they have
> compared it to Veritas.
You obviously have, in such a situation, a need for a library, and
one with multimegabyte a second drives in it. This will be far
more important in terms of getting the backups done in a timely
manner in the wee hours than the software you use to accomplish
that.
Also far more costly than the software even if it was arkeia or
veritas.
But since amanda is a client/server setup, and the client can be
told to do the compression, the next consideration would be the
occupied network bandwidth while the backup is running. Using
client compression can make night and day differences in the
network loading and its general useability while the backup is in
progress. You'll need at least 100baseT if its going to get well
into the 10's of gigabytes per session.
IMO amanda is a viable option, here's why:
Support: I'd be willing to bet you'll get help here at least as fast
as you'll get it from veritas, we're (some of us) awake all around
the world on a 24/7/365 basis. Veritas keep office hours.
Stability: I've been running the latest snapshots, and have yet to
feel the need to come back to this list and report that
snapshot-version-date so-and-so was busted for my little 2 machine
home system.
And we have been told that the United States Dept. of Agriculture
has been using amanda for quite some time, and I believe that would
qualify as a large organization. However, I'd expect that, except
for the Washington DC offices, is a distributed in little
autonomous pieces setup.
>I looked at using amanda once for my home computer (Sun Ultra 80,
> about 200 Gb of disk space over 4/5 drives, 40 Gb tape drive),
> but decided that for such a small system, a couple of unix shell
> scripts run by cron was all I needed, so never bothered using
> amanda. I know shell scripts are currently used here but we
> intend expanding the disk space by quite a lot.
>
>So basically:
>a) I know little about amanda
We were all there once :)
>b) Have no intention of using it myself for my home computer, but
> wonder if its a variable option in a university department (~100
> staff).
Why not? For a home system, its a piece of cake. I have a 4 tape
magazine drive, so I don't have the daily chore of remembering to
change the tapes. Amcheck emails me to remind me it couldn't find
the next tape it needs, half a day before its actually needed, so
the responsibility of seeing to it the proper tapes are loaded is
mine. Not too bad on an every 4th day schedule. Other than that,
once up and running, that is the sum total of human intervention
required to run amanda. If I had a 30 tape library, I could close
the door and lock it, but then I do a 5 day cycle to get everything
in a full, and have 28 tapes in the pool, so I have over 4 full
fulls on hand at any one time. Paranoid maybe...
Besides, doing it on your home system will automaticly make you an
expert when the university deploys it.
>
>Dr. David Kirkby PhD,
>Senior Research Fellow,
>Department of Medical Physics,
>University College London,
>11-20 Capper St, London, WC1E 6JA.
>Tel: 020 7679 6408 Fax: 020 7679 6269
>Internal telephone: ext 46408
>e-mail davek AT medphys.ucl.ac DOT uk
>Web page: http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~davek
--
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M
99.24% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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