[MACEP] Backup Management

[Eric Harrison]

On Sat, 21 Jan 2006, Darrin King wrote:

> Hi Mike,
> The cost per gigabyte basically is the cost of a lower end xServe w/ 
> fibre channel card, the biggest xServe raid and a copy of Retrospect. 
> That roughly works out to $16,000 for 7 terabytes of storage or about 
> $2.29 per gig.  You could shave a  couple of grand off the price by 
> dropping maintenance agreements or using an old workstation with a 
> fibre channel card to run Retrospect , but that will increase the 
> amount of time it takes to do backups and recoveries.  We opted to 
> go the xServe route to get the fastest speed possible and it gave us
> the added option of an additional box we could use for other things
> during business hours.
>
> Darrin

That's not too bad of a price!

I paid $5,500 for 2TB of storage = $2.69/GB. That is hardware only, no
software, no support contracts. The server itself is high-end, it has
two dual-core AMD Opterons (yum, four CPUs!), four GB of ram, and an
LSI Megraid controller.

With the rapid increase in drive size vs price, the $/GB keeps dropping.
I just penciled out what my server would have cost filled with 500GB
drives ($350/drive on pricewatch.com), it would have been 7TB for
$9,300 = $1.29TB !


For software we are using BackupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net)
BackupPC is very slick, it uses a compression and pooling technique
that is very disk-space efficient - our current backups are 7 times
larger than the disk space that is actually used on the backup server.
It uses rsync, ssh/tar, or smb to access servers. We use rsync for
most servers - rsync is a "remote-update protocol that allows rsync
to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the
network connection, using an efficient checksum-search algorithm"


We also have a tape robot with 3 AIT-III drives, it was something
like $50,000. Each tape is ~$60 and holds 200GB. For software it 
uses Arkiea. I don't remember the price tag, but it wasn't too
scary ($10,000 ?) compared to the alternatives. With 200 tapes (40TB)
that works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $2/GB. Great
capacity, but the total price is a bit stiff ;-)

-Eric

> Mike Ely <mely at rogueriver.k12.or.us> on Friday, January 20, 2006 at 4:44 PM -0800 wrote:
>> What kind of cost per gigabyte did your storage solution come to?  I'm
>> looking at different options to replace our current (nonexistant) backup
>> solution.
>>
>> I have to second the idea of using quotas.  Currently, I've got a few
>> users in the 2-5 Gig homedirectory range.  I'm not saying that's never
>> neccessary, but in those cases it's probably useful to come up with
>> alternative solutions.