Wired

After reading the post on backing up data, which Mike recently wrote, it reminded me of my latest setup regarding servers and backups. As you can probably imagine, I have installed a lot of technology at home. The very latest are networked attached storage (NAS) devices on my home network. They are actually beta units of our upcoming TeraSpool NAS product.

I wanted to have a lot of storage that I could access from any computer anywhere in the house. And with 500GByte drives pretty cheap, I thought 1 Terabyte would do nicely. But what about backups of the server? It’s one thing to have a huge server where you can put all your music, videos, home documents, etc. But you want to make sure it’s backed-up somewhere, right? I mean a 1 Terabyte server is pretty scary if you fill it all up with your important documents. Then what…… How do you back this thing up? With what media?

You read all sorts of things about RAID this and RAID that. But the more I probed, the more I realized you need to remove the ’single source of failure’ in a safe and secure server setup. RAID works great in case a drive dies, but there is still a single source of failure…..There is only one hard disk controller. OK you can get around that by using two controller boards. But there still is a single source of failure……The computer itself and it’s single power supply. Boy, this is getting harder to solve than I initially realized.

So my final solution is to have two complete servers, in separate rooms and environments, and on separate breakers. Now to keep the two servers mirror images of themselves, I configured the RSYNC package, which is included with the Wired TeraSpool NAS. So every night a little after midnight, the servers sync themselves up automatically. You cannot realize how relaxing it is to know that you have a huge server, accessable from anywhere in the house, and that it get’s backed up every night to an identical server. In case any part of the server goes down or has problems, I can immediately log into the backup server and get my data to continue my work. What a joy technology is when it works correctly.

If you are interested in hearing more about our networking setups with NAS and video setups, drop me a line. And if you want to know more about our TeraSpool NAS, send an email to our sales dept [sales (at) wiredinc.com].

-Mark [mark (at) wiredinc.com]

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Marks Corner Table. You can skip to the end and leave a response.