Adding disk storage

External Since: Nov 23, 2005 Posts: 3

What would be the best approach to add large amounts of data storage
for housing backups of customer databases? We are talking terabytes
of data that will need to be redundant as well as be backed up on tape
for offsite storage. We are a Windows shop only. Would network
attached storage be a possibility? Thank you for any insight.

External Since: Nov 07, 2003 Posts: 2186

Previously Xignals <xignals@> wrote:
> What would be the best approach to add large amounts of data storage
> for housing backups of customer databases? We are talking terabytes
> of data that will need to be redundant as well as be backed up on tape
> for offsite storage. We are a Windows shop only. Would network
> attached storage be a possibility? Thank you for any insight.

I have experience with Linux servers and I have up to 3 TB (could be
made 4-5TB with larger disks) with software RAID5. It works pretty
well, but I would not attempt to do something similar with Windows.
Your option is likely to use SAN storage (a lot more expensive) with
hardware-RAID.

As for redundancy, I would probably want to have the date on three
servers with similar configuration, so that there is hardware
redundancy. For the backup-to-tape and copy-from-customer processes
you should be very carefull to make them reliable.

I agree with the first answer here that you should seek outside
helpfor this, both because Windows is eminently unsuitable for this
type of work and because it os far more domplicated than just
providing reliable storage.

Arno