What's the best way to expand our storage and maintain off-site backups
Hi.
Over the holidays, our server ran out of space. We have a Windows2003 server with 3 physical SCSI drives (several partitions), and we need to expand our storage capacity, quickly.
Our system has been backing up onto an HP Ultrium tape drive, and every night we take 1 tape off-site in case of catastrophe in the building.
Initially we wanted to add a NAS-box connected to the network directly, which in addition to expanding our storage would take some traffic off the server: we would move all our large artwork files onto the NAS and hope to see higher speeds accessing data files on the server.
Our problem is that we cannot back up 100 GB of data over the network onto the tape drive on a nightly basis - by my math, that would take anywhere between 20 and 40 hours.
I've been looking into NAS-boxes that support hot-swapping, thinking that we could use several mirrored drives in the same way we've been using tapes (remove 1 drive on alternate nights and leave it off site), but I'm concerned that this would cause added stress and wear on the enclosure or the drives.
Can anyone recommend the best (read most cost-effective) way to solve our problem? We need more space, and we need it fast!
Thanks
Over the holidays, our server ran out of space. We have a Windows2003 server with 3 physical SCSI drives (several partitions), and we need to expand our storage capacity, quickly.
Our system has been backing up onto an HP Ultrium tape drive, and every night we take 1 tape off-site in case of catastrophe in the building.
Initially we wanted to add a NAS-box connected to the network directly, which in addition to expanding our storage would take some traffic off the server: we would move all our large artwork files onto the NAS and hope to see higher speeds accessing data files on the server.
Our problem is that we cannot back up 100 GB of data over the network onto the tape drive on a nightly basis - by my math, that would take anywhere between 20 and 40 hours.
I've been looking into NAS-boxes that support hot-swapping, thinking that we could use several mirrored drives in the same way we've been using tapes (remove 1 drive on alternate nights and leave it off site), but I'm concerned that this would cause added stress and wear on the enclosure or the drives.
Can anyone recommend the best (read most cost-effective) way to solve our problem? We need more space, and we need it fast!
Thanks
Depending on what your server currently is you may be able to erplace the disks with bigger ones or add more disks and expand the array. What server/RAID controller is it?
ASKER
It's a Compaq server.
We could add another disk, but it's about $400 per 100GB, so budget-wise that's not the way we want to go.
Also, we'd like to implement network-attached storage to move traffic off the server. We've been experiencing slow-downs accessing our data when the artwork department is busy, and are hoping that by moving the artwork files off the server we'll clear up that bottle-neck.
We could add another disk, but it's about $400 per 100GB, so budget-wise that's not the way we want to go.
Also, we'd like to implement network-attached storage to move traffic off the server. We've been experiencing slow-downs accessing our data when the artwork department is busy, and are hoping that by moving the artwork files off the server we'll clear up that bottle-neck.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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