On 13/12/06 2:06 AM, "Tony Skalski" <ajs AT STOLAF DOT EDU> wrote:

> Thanks for the feedback.
> 
> Siobhán Ellis wrote:
>> So, you are going to backup systems across the network to a network mounted
>> disk farm. Therein lies a problem!
>> 
>> Then you are going to clone (not stage?) to tape by pulling the data across
>> the network again?
> 
> The networker server is here in our data center, and the disk farm is at an
> off-site data center connected via a dedicated GigE link - so no extra traffic
> on our production network.

So I would suggest trying to use iSCSI rather than NFS. Better performance.

> 
>> My basic question is, why are you going to backup to disk?
> 
> Faster restores, off-site disaster recovery. And re: cloning vs. staging, I
> want 
> to keep the disk backups as long as possible (at least a month) to facilitate
> restores. It is my understanding that staging will remove the savesets from
> the 
> disk when they are staged to tape. From reading the list, I gathered that many
> prefer the manual scripted cloning option than Networker's built-in staging.
> Of 
> course, the separate retention times for clones vs. originals in 7.3 would
> help, 
> but that would mean upgrading to 7.3 which does not seem to get high marks
> here.

You can use staging from the command line as well. But, yes, if you keep on
disk, you should clone to another backup device. As, if you loose your disk,
you've lost your backup.

There have been some comments about loosing performance. With SATA you
should avoid writing to it and reading from it as much as you can, because
it does suffer terribly with performance in those cases. This is less of an
issue with SATA II. Basically, as SATA disks improve in performance, so the
problem becomes less.
 
> ajs


Siobhán

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