Windows 2003 Storage Server may be a viable alternative. Plenty of vendors have or will be releasing NAS devices using this OS (Dell and HP come to mind). Not sure about the NFS support as I haven't looked that far into it yet. If services for Unix/Linux aren't available, then you can always turn to a couple of SAMBA servers.

 

Snapshotting? I know there is Volume Shadow Copy services (VSS) which will do a cut-down version of snapshot. Take a look at the whitepapers from Microsoft and make up your own mind.

 

I believe is no substitute for Netapp at the enterprise level.

 

As for your DR. Snapmirror is your best bet and you will need to stick with Netapp obviously. However, some well orchestrated rsync script/crontab'ing could give you basic production data replication. It depends on how critical your CEO considers the data to be and how much time you have to spend setting it all up. Snapmirror comes with the excellence of Netapp support. Rsync'ing comes with the level of support you are capable of providing.

 

Windows Storage server is unproven but it is built on stable and fundamental NAS principles.

 

I doubt very much that the simulator could be reconfigured to do what you are suggesting. Even if you could, I am sure there would be some hefty licensing issues to deal with.

 

Aaron

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Truong [mailto:JasonT@plumtree.com]
Sent:
Thursday, 2 October 2003 3:18 AM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Another disaster recovery solution

 

Hello toasters,

 

(thanks for the MRTG ideas)

 

We have a F820 in our office which we currently back up to tape.  We are in the process of moving some servers to a collo location for disaster recovery options.  I wondering if there is a cheap IDE solution (or cheap SCSI) to running something similar to a NetApp.  Like maybe a Linux machine with the ONTAP simulator.  (does the simulator perform snapshots?)  Basically, we

 

 

If anyone has some good ideas/solutions/share their case examples, that I would really appreciate it.  Also, I think many others can benefit from this.

 

Thank you.

 

Jason T.



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