Amanda-Users

Re: tar's default block size & shoe-shinning

2006-06-19 12:14:37
Subject: Re: tar's default block size & shoe-shinning
From: Michael Loftis <mloftis AT wgops DOT com>
To: Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 AT duke DOT edu>, amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:06:10 -0600


--On June 19, 2006 10:59:58 AM -0400 Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 AT duke DOT edu> wrote:

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006 at 4:31pm, Cyrille Bollu wrote

But, when we purchased the backup server I agreed to follow my boss'
solution (it's always him you known ;-p) to buy that cheaper server with
maximum 1,5TB RAID5 (6*300GB) instead of that nice DAS with up to 3,9TB
RAID5. So, to save space I created one big volume containing both the OS
and the data.

What type of drives, and what RAID card?  What OS/distro are we talking,
and what SCSI card for the tape drive?

In a configuration where amanda only backup local (SCSI) drives, are
there any benefits from using a holding disk?

Not that I can think of.  And especially with an LTO3 drive, it's really
only going to hurt you.

Actually with AMANDA it might be a really good idea esp. with the faster drives because there's no way you can keep them streaming over the network. The problem becomes getting a holding area fast enough....RAID0 with 4-8 decently fast SCSI drives....like 9 or 18Gb 10k RPM or 15k RPM split over a couple of channels.

AMANDA doesn't interleave onto tape like a lot of the other software does. Several commercial packages interleave blocks from everyone currently backing up while they're writing to tape, whereas AMANDA does not. This causes AMANDA to slow down significantly when you get one slow or slowerish host. This also will cause excessive shoe-shining since the network then gets in the way of the tape streaming too.