Protecting a NAS - Backups
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@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
You can do extreme high redundancy with Samba solutions, too. Not the same as DFS, but you can meet the needs.
Any good go-to articles you refer people to for such a thing? I'm currently just surfing Google but I'm sure you can set things up depending on the environment needs...
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@BBigford said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
You can do extreme high redundancy with Samba solutions, too. Not the same as DFS, but you can meet the needs.
Any good go-to articles you refer people to for such a thing? I'm currently just surfing Google but I'm sure you can set things up depending on the environment needs...
No, but that's on my how to list, but won't be soon as the lab is about to go down for an extended period of time
But just really quickly, you can handle Samba HA through...
- DRBD and Pacemaker Clustering between two nodes.
- RSYNC style replication between two nodes.
- Putting Samba onto an HA platform like XS, ESXi, Scale or whatever where you have the high reliability provided by the underlying system.
Fileservers are among the easiest things to make HA so you have more options than normal. Synology even has an HA option baked in.
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@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@BBigford said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
You can do extreme high redundancy with Samba solutions, too. Not the same as DFS, but you can meet the needs.
Any good go-to articles you refer people to for such a thing? I'm currently just surfing Google but I'm sure you can set things up depending on the environment needs...
the lab is about to go down for an extended period of time
Why?
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@BBigford said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@BBigford said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
You can do extreme high redundancy with Samba solutions, too. Not the same as DFS, but you can meet the needs.
Any good go-to articles you refer people to for such a thing? I'm currently just surfing Google but I'm sure you can set things up depending on the environment needs...
the lab is about to go down for an extended period of time
Why?
There is another thread about that. Colocation America is our new datacenter partner (there was no old one to replace) and the whole lab is being taken down this Friday evening and driven literally coast to coast as the whole shebang moves to Los Angeles and a brand new Tier IV datacenter!! We are very excited.
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@chrisl is helping us out with the new setup.
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@scottalanmiller It's gonna be sweeeeeeeet.
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@ChrisL said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@scottalanmiller It's gonna be sweeeeeeeet.
Yeah, it is. We can't wait!!
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I was thinking about Synology more last night... having 2 boxes, then a higher capacity box to hold both smaller capacity boxes data, in case one of them fail.
Redundancy, check. Can make them a DFS target, check. But what about version control/backups? Oops. One thing I didn't take into account is that the redundancy between the boxes is there, but what about when someone deletes something by accident?
I planned on talking to Synology today, about deleted files being archived for a length of time before they're really deleted. But, I can't remember with the last boxes I setup if that was a feature because honestly we never even needed it until now. If it's not, it comes down to Samba vs. Windows File Services and I know Windows will win by popularity.
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Nothing that is replication and/or fault tolerance is a backup. Those are discrete ideas and have to be handled separately.
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@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
Nothing that is replication and/or fault tolerance is a backup. Those are discrete ideas and have to be handled separately.
Right, it would be getting more into an area of undelete rather than backup control.
I think we're just going to end up virtualizing the file servers (they are old physical boxes that should have been virtualized years ago), keep them on Windows since we can continue to protect them with DPM, and call it a day.
Not trying to reinvent the wheel, but when the wheel can be repurposed to do something more efficiently...
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@BBigford said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
Nothing that is replication and/or fault tolerance is a backup. Those are discrete ideas and have to be handled separately.
Right, it would be getting more into an area of undelete rather than backup control.
I think we're just going to end up virtualizing the file servers (they are old physical boxes that should have been virtualized years ago), keep them on Windows since we can continue to protect them with DPM, and call it a day.
Not trying to reinvent the wheel, but when the wheel can be repurposed to do something more efficiently...
I still am wondering what is wrong with the old servers other than you don't have enough local storage since you're hanging a USB drive off at least one for cold storage.
If you have the compute power in your VM host platform, you can easily put this there, the question is where will you store the data? You still might end up going with a NAS, sharing the storage to the VM fileserver itself, then shares from there.
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@Dashrender said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@BBigford said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:
Nothing that is replication and/or fault tolerance is a backup. Those are discrete ideas and have to be handled separately.
Right, it would be getting more into an area of undelete rather than backup control.
I think we're just going to end up virtualizing the file servers (they are old physical boxes that should have been virtualized years ago), keep them on Windows since we can continue to protect them with DPM, and call it a day.
Not trying to reinvent the wheel, but when the wheel can be repurposed to do something more efficiently...
I still am wondering what is wrong with the old servers other than you don't have enough local storage since you're hanging a USB drive off at least one for cold storage.
If you have the compute power in your VM host platform, you can easily put this there, the question is where will you store the data? You still might end up going with a NAS, sharing the storage to the VM fileserver itself, then shares from there.
After looking back over things, we're getting some new boxes for hosts to both replace EOL hosts and create another cluster (we have one cluster at one site, this would be a cluster at another site for different services), and what I'll end up doing is virtualizing the file servers. But then there was the question of storage. I'll move all the VMs and anything else off the local storage and move it over to the SAN, then increase the capacity on the local storage and dedicate that pool to the virtual file server, then backup that volume with our existing DPM. All in all, we'll end end up spending about $800 per server (just the cost of drives for some added local storage).
The reason for getting rid of the old servers... They are old Gateway servers that sometimes don't come back when you reboot them so you have to drive 45 minutes (for one colo... if its the other one I can call the NOC where it's located) to bring it back. They are slow and sometimes stall during peak hours. Overall, they should be virtualized anyway. I even scrapped the Synology idea because it would cost more, was a bit more complicated with backups, and I can't justify physical boxes for storage. If we run out of storage on the hosts after I increase the capacity, I could just add another drive shelf but that will be about 2-3 years at our current growth rate.
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Sounds like an awesome plan.
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