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Is it possible to mirror MSA Shelves or do you have to use SAN Mirroring?

Hi,
I have a MSA 1500 in which I have four SATA shelves, unfortunately the location that this MSA is going to find itself (at sea) does not lend itself to being backed up easily! Is there a way to mirror shelves within the MSA? or would I  have to look at a full SAN mirroring solution, if I did would there be a way of fooling it into think its two MSAs?

Thanks

Michael
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Not really, you can achieve shelf redundancy by having half the disks of an array on one shelf and the other half in another shelf since it is meant to mirror across chanels if it can but then if you break the mirror you are left with a RAID 0 stripe which is pretty risky. The MSA doesn't support SAN mirroring either, the storage mirroring solution offered by HP for it is host based (rebadged doubletake software). What you could do is create two (lets say RAID 5) arrays and mirror them in software,giving in effect RAID 51. Then you could split the mirror using the OS tools.

It's better really to have a tape library since mirroring doesn't protect you from a virus writing all over both arrays. I can't see why tape libraries won't work on a ship.
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More to do with the cost than the libraries themselves, its a research vessel so loads of data and not much money!

Thanks for the comment!

Michael
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