[K12OSN] Data Storage - Redundancy and Backup Suggestions

[Daniel Bodanske]

>From the size of your enrollment, I'm going to guess that your budget
is limited. Hardware raid is significantly more expensive than
software raid and the less expensive hardware raid systems are simply
software raid on a chip. Hardware raid does offer you simple swapping
and rebuilding, though I understand that SATA solves this problem in
some cases.

Get a SATA card aind out about software raid on Linux here:
http://www.linux.com/howtos/Software-RAID-HOWTO.shtml

You are specifically interested in section 6 on monitoring. mdadm can
mail you automatically when errors start.

Good luck,

Dan

On 5/4/07, Martin Woolley <sysadmin at handsworth.bham.sch.uk> wrote:
> On Friday 04 May 2007 01:38, Nick Fenger wrote:
> > Hello fellow K12ltsp'ers,
> >
> > Currently, all of my student's files (and some of mine) are spinning on an
> > old 80GB drive in the smb-ldap PDC with no backup and no redundancy. I can
> > barely sleep at night.
> >
> > We are starting a online student portfolio project next year that will add
> > lots of data that needs to be safely stored, backed up, etc...
> >
> > Any suggestions for size, type of drives, should I stick them in the PDC
> > and just use software RAID or do I need some kind of Hardware solution?
> > Should I buy some kind of external drive array? How will I know if
> > something goes wrong? and what is the best way to backup all of this data?
> >
> > We are a single site independent charter school with a maximum enrollment
> > of 320 students K-12.
>
> Hardware RAID is far superior to software RAID.  What we do is
> - the students data lives on a file server with a RAID 5 array.
> - every night this data is copied to another RAID 5 array at the opposite end
> of the school, in a completely separate building. We use rsync.
> - every night this backup is further backed up to tape.
> - the tapes are stored in a  third part of the school.
>
> The only weakness in our solution is someone is assuming that the wooden
> bookshelf the tapes live in is fireproof, but I don't worry to much.
>
> In theory our recovery strategy is
> - if the file server dies, the backup server can become the file server.
> - if the backup server dies, no problems, just get another file server and
> continue the scheme
> - if an aeroplane crashes and wipes out the whole site, tough, although I do
> have the a tape under the bed at home so we could get back some of the
> students data (albeit  a month or two out of date).
> --
> Regards
> Martin Woolley
> ICT Support
> Handsworth Grammar School
> Isis Astarte Diana Hecate Demeter Kali Inanna
>
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