----- Original Message ----- From: Brian Tao taob@risc.org To: Bruce Sterling Woodcock sirbruce@ix.netcom.com Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2000 3:43 PM Subject: Re: Centralized backup of multiple filers
On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
Another point: Is buying and attaching all that disk to the SUN systems really cheaper than simply attaching a local tape drive?
You mean a local tape drive to each Netapp? A terabyte of localdisk (24x50GB Barracudas, Kingston Datasilo enclosures, hot-swap canisters, cabling) only costs about $40000. 12 tape libraries (one per Netapp) would cost much more than that, and I'd rather deal with a couple of Exabyte X80's than, say, a dozen EXB-220's.
Okay, first I was assuming it was less filers than that. After all, 1 terabyte can fit on just one or two filers. Secondly, I was assuming more storage than that; depending on your backup schedule, you need enough storage to cover more than one filer at once. You also need to include the price of your SUN hardware (even if you already have it, you're tying up that money in this scheme rather than elsewhere) and the associated network infrastructure. Finally, if you really have some filers with that small amount of storage, they don't all need a library, just a simple stacker.
And setting up a cluster with SnapMirror would probably be more expensive, but not prohibitively so.
A loaded E420R tape server with local disk storage comes out toaround $75000. An F760 with a terabyte of disk and enough SnapMirror licenses for all the filers adds up to around $450K. Maybe I'm missing something... I'm assuming I need to buy a SnapMirror license for each of the dozen filers mirroring to the tape server filer.
Good question on the last part; I don't know.
Bruce