Hi.

I don't see much return on making those primary disk storagepools
sequential, because once they get tape hardware, you can just "move data" or
migrate the backup data off of the random diskpool volumes.  In fact, it's
more of a headache because you'll have to start reclaiming them and whatnot.
Definitely stay with random access disk volumes in your primary diskpools.

For copypool, I wonder.  Since your installation is so small, I wonder if
you can get some hotswap drive bays (do those exist for IDE?), buy 2 more
IDE hard drives (they're fairly cheap, aren't they?), and start an offsite
rotation of your copypool disks.  That would be cute.  And much cheaper than
investing in a new tape infrastructure to begin with.  Hmm... I wonder if I
can do that with Shark disk.  But your copypool would have to be sequential,
so that would complicate matters.

If you can figure out how to do sequential volumes and reclamation and
whatnot on disk, I would use those two disks as copypool, with or without
the extra 2 disks for offsite.  Then if you have an application based
corruption of your primary diskpool volumes, your copypool has a good chance
of surviving that because it's more of an asynchronous "mirror" process.
Synchronous mirroring would be more vulnerable to application based
corruptions.

Have you given any thought to how you're going to manage your dbbackups?
It's a good thing to have them on some other machine or media.  You could
back up your database to disk and ftp it to another machine, or mount remote
disk and back up to it, or half a dozen other variations.

Good luck.

Alex Paschal
Storage Administrator
Freightliner, LLC
(503) 745-6850 phone/vmail