--On Tuesday, July 20, 2004 14:41:43 -0700 Mike Fedyk <mfedyk AT matchmail DOT 
com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> [ This is my first post to this list, and it looks like "reply to all" is 
> accepted here, so that's what I'm doing...]
> 
> Kris Vassallo wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 04:24, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>> 
>>> /On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 at 5:19pm, Kris Vassallo wrote
>>> 
>>>> 420GB is not the total amount per night. Something is bogging this down
>>>> though and I don't know what. I am not using holding disks because the
>>>> majority of data is being backed up from one set of disks to another on
>>>> the same machine. This one machine has a set of RAID 10 disks. These
>>>> disks are backed up by amanda and put onto a set of RAID 5 disks. As far
>>> 
>>> Just as an aside, having your backup disks on the same controller as your 
>>> real data seems a bit risky to me -- what if the controller goes?  What if 
>>> it takes multiple disks with it?/
>>> 
>> The whole thing of having the backup host being the same machine as 
>> the file server no longer looks like a good idea. However, I am in it 
>> too deep to jump out now. I suppose that I could get a second 
>> controller in the box, but to me it seems as if that would only create 
>> another bottleneck, the pci bus.
> 
> Why?
> 
> You have the compression done on the client anyway, so just take an older
> (probably Pentium II class or better) machine and use that as your Amanda
> server.

Generally true if you're using tape, but Kris is using the file driver
and backing up to disk, so his backup server would probably need over
a terabyte of space (to keep two fulls and the incrementals of a 400GB
filesystem).  Although if the backup disks could easily be moved
to another box it would speed things up.

Frank

-- 
Frank Smith                                      fsmith AT hoovers DOT com
Sr. Systems Administrator                       Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                   Fax: 512-374-4501