Ralf Gross <Ralf-Lists AT ralfgross DOT de> wrote on 02/19/2010 10:42:35 AM:

> bit off topic:
> Right now I'm looking for a cheap storage solution that is based
> on supermicro chassis with 36 drive bays (server) or 45 drive bays
> (expansion unit) in 4 HU. Frightening, that would be 810 TB in one
> Rack (36 + 45 HDDs x 5 x 2 TB, 40 HU) with 5 servers. Only problem is
> power, cooling and.... backup.

That's why companies like EMC and NetApp get big money for selling you 
nearly the *exact* same hardware:  but with software and services designed 
to handle things like...backup.

With storage sets of that size, there's really very little you can do 
outside of snapshots, volume management and lots and lots of disk (and 
chassis and processor and power and ...) redundancy.  Simply traversing a 
file system of that size is going to take more time than you have for a 
backup window.  If you want anything approaching daily backups, you can't 
do it at the filesystem level.  :(

And even for things like off-site backup, it's far easier to have a 
smaller version of your big array off-site and sync a snapshot 
periodically (taking advantage of the logging/COW filesystem of the array 
system) than it is to try to traverse an entire 800TB filesystem (or 
multiple filesystems that add up to 800TB).

Tim Massey


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