antic
Perch
Hi all,
Just read the Win6 announcement - sorry for the big job you guys had over Christmas!
Just an idea, maybe look into a different type of backup procedure for your servers, which could be much quicker.
I'm by no means a server technician, I'm a software developer - but here are a few snippets taken from another source, from someone who knows their stuff:
"My product of the month for backups that I use for all my SBS installations is EMC Dantz Retrospect http://www.dantz.com/en/products/index.dtml Set and forget, backs up *NIX as well and I suspect I've recommended it in the past too. There is a eval version available if anyone feels like checking it out. Replistor is quite a nice product of theirs too."
Don't know how that stacks up with Acronis, but it might be worth a look at?
"With the revenue you loose each time this happens, hiring a certified disaster recovery consultant to come in and take a look at things would probably pay for itself pretty quickly. Someone who knows all the products out there, their capabilities and shortfalls and who can suggest and implement a failsafe BRP strategy for you." - could also be something to look into?
"On my own servers, generally I have just a second drive NOT in a mirrored configuration, but on a controler independent of the primary drive and I simply use a daily disk mirror job to this drive, then Retrospect off that drive to my daily backups, means two levels of redundancy and unless it's a corrupt controller the backup drive usually is always available, you can also spin-down that secondary drive when not in use to preserve it's MTBF... You can spin down the second drive in the machine to preserve it's life span as well, further mitigating the risks of having two drives having near simultaneous physical failures."
"One reason I like Retrospect is the compression you get both backing up and restoring, this does cut significant time from your restores becuase instead of transferring 100GB you end up transferring about a 5th of that on average."
"Rather than using RAID1 which has it's flaws (though it does have some benefits as well like improved read I/O .. hard to measure though becuase webservers do tend to have higher write I/O's than you'd expect and Raid 1 write throughput is generally accepted to be slower than that of a single drive configuration) Using 2 drives per machine not in a mirrored config (for me personally) has served me pretty well... The biggest problem with most forms of Raid as I mentioned earlier are that if you loose the controller, have software corruption (virus etc) then you're still left in a total recovery situation, you can't rebuild from the array becuase both copies of your data are corrupt."
Hope all that means something to someone!
Just read the Win6 announcement - sorry for the big job you guys had over Christmas!
Just an idea, maybe look into a different type of backup procedure for your servers, which could be much quicker.
I'm by no means a server technician, I'm a software developer - but here are a few snippets taken from another source, from someone who knows their stuff:
"My product of the month for backups that I use for all my SBS installations is EMC Dantz Retrospect http://www.dantz.com/en/products/index.dtml Set and forget, backs up *NIX as well and I suspect I've recommended it in the past too. There is a eval version available if anyone feels like checking it out. Replistor is quite a nice product of theirs too."
Don't know how that stacks up with Acronis, but it might be worth a look at?
"With the revenue you loose each time this happens, hiring a certified disaster recovery consultant to come in and take a look at things would probably pay for itself pretty quickly. Someone who knows all the products out there, their capabilities and shortfalls and who can suggest and implement a failsafe BRP strategy for you." - could also be something to look into?
"On my own servers, generally I have just a second drive NOT in a mirrored configuration, but on a controler independent of the primary drive and I simply use a daily disk mirror job to this drive, then Retrospect off that drive to my daily backups, means two levels of redundancy and unless it's a corrupt controller the backup drive usually is always available, you can also spin-down that secondary drive when not in use to preserve it's MTBF... You can spin down the second drive in the machine to preserve it's life span as well, further mitigating the risks of having two drives having near simultaneous physical failures."
"One reason I like Retrospect is the compression you get both backing up and restoring, this does cut significant time from your restores becuase instead of transferring 100GB you end up transferring about a 5th of that on average."
"Rather than using RAID1 which has it's flaws (though it does have some benefits as well like improved read I/O .. hard to measure though becuase webservers do tend to have higher write I/O's than you'd expect and Raid 1 write throughput is generally accepted to be slower than that of a single drive configuration) Using 2 drives per machine not in a mirrored config (for me personally) has served me pretty well... The biggest problem with most forms of Raid as I mentioned earlier are that if you loose the controller, have software corruption (virus etc) then you're still left in a total recovery situation, you can't rebuild from the array becuase both copies of your data are corrupt."
Hope all that means something to someone!
