Hello,
We have been running ADSM in-house here for a couple of months, meaning
just our staff have had access. As we begin to consider letting this
out campus-wide I have some questions that some of you may be able to
help me with.
We have concerns about supporting workstation backups around campus.
During our internal testing with 15 or so staff members we have
encouraged users to schedule their backups. We have defined a backup
window that operations can kick off sometime during 3rd shift when
they have free tape drives and (hopefully) the network is less busy.
If we have potentially hundreds of workstations and a few fileservers
that all want to use this service, how big is that window going to need
to be? Can we backup them up in 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours? How do
we begin to estimate this? And if we do it this way will the network
be totally tied up?
I'm also concerned about the database. How large will it grow? (I
probably should be able to find some numbers a manual for this but
this is a very general question)
How many people are going to be needed to go about campus helping
users install clients, setup their options etc? Sure some of them
can do it themselves but ALOT will have no idea what to do.
And what about when a disk fails? Now I know MOST of these users will
be calling us! I'll need a minimum system on floppies to restore in
order for them to be able to contact the server and restore their
files. How involved will this become? If the average disk fails once
every 4 years and there are roughly 1500 pc/macs on campus, that is one
failure a day (including weekends). (The average disk life is purely
a guess on my part - what if it's more like every 2 years?!!) And the
pc/mac/workstation growth rate is pretty high.
How are you all dealing with all these questions? I see this as a
severely needed service but we need to answer some of these questions
in order to know how to proceed.
I also really don't want to start doing all these backups while tape
twinning is not yet available. Any information on when that will be
out? We take enough heat around here (running that old, antique,....
too expensive IBM mainframe) to want to tell anyone 'Sorry your data
was on a tape that went bad'.
If anyone can share any of their experiences here I would certainly
appreciate it.
Katherine Faella Bitnet: KMF@URIACC
Sr. Technical Programmer Internet: KMF AT URIACC.URI DOT EDU
University of Rhode Island
Academic Computer Center
048 Tyler Hall
Kingston, RI 02881 Phone: (401) 792-2501
|
