[Lias] NAS/SAN storage recommendations?

[Les Bell]

"Ian Ralph" <ian at sceggs.nsw.edu.au> wrote:

>>
After a few months the mainboard and 2 of the 4 IDE HDDs failed and it was
returned under warranty <lesson> Don't trust IDE drives for network
critical devices</lesson>.
<<

Although this is really an issue of quality, rather than architecture, I'd
generally agree. A lot of IDE drives have a quality level set by a target
low price. And no-one can accuse SCSI drive manufacturers of being driven
to pursue the low-cost end of the market. . .

Watch out for low-end IDE RAID controllers like the Promise TX2. It's
really not much more than a straight IDE controller, and their binary-only
drivers are a pain to work with if you want to have anything other than the
kernel that comes on the RH 7.3 and 8.0 CD's - like one that has security
fixes, for example. I've got one, and it's sort of OK for what I want,
using the ataraid and pcdraid drivers in the kernel, but I'm sure if I'd
done more research and shopping around I could have done better.

The big issue for me is how to back the sucker up. I bought a Seagate
Travan 20 GB SCSI tape drive, but of the two tapes I've bought (Imation 20
GB tapes, being used without compression) two have failed after only a few
uses. Retensioning the tape doesn't help - once it's dead, it's dead. One
tape is soldiering on, backing up 8GB of data every night. But at roughly
$80 per tape, I'm baffled how they could become unusable so fast. Current
theory is that it might be temperature related, so next week's job is to
move the system into a Supermicro-style full-size tower with more fans.

Does anyone have any other recommendations for tape backup?

Best,

--- Les Bell, RHCE, CISSP
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]