RAID or Tape Backup - Would RAID be good enough ? (Posted by vbedceo)
Is SCSI Controller a must for you? I know that you can run RAID for IDE Hard Drives as well. When your budget is tight this is also a consideration until you can afford SCSI Hardware. There is a product called FAST TRACK by Promise (www.promise.com) that offers a Controller that can do RAID Levels 0 and 1 for under half the cost of a SCSI Controller and Hard Drives.
The seek times will be slightly slower. Just make sure you get an UDMA 66 support hard drive with 7200 RPM.
This way you can still spend money on tape backup.
vbedceo posted this at 18:25 — 11th November 1999.
They have: 21 posts
Joined: Sep 1999
For a small-medium business, would having RAID system be good enough to maintain the server? Do we really need to have "tape backup" in place too? I do understand that it would be perfect to have both for your server for extreme redundancy and reliability.
But I guess my question is if the budget was so tight, which way would(should) you go if we were to pick just one, either RAID or TAPE BACKUP?
I will enjoy reading your reasoning
DebS posted this at 01:24 — 12th November 1999.
They have: 6 posts
Joined: Jul 1999
Tape backup, for two reasons: multiple generations of backups, and offsite storage of backups. I'm assuming it's your own server to which you have physical access.
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JP Stones posted this at 03:17 — 12th November 1999.
They have: 2,390 posts
Joined: Nov 1998
RAID?
JP
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vbedceo posted this at 03:43 — 12th November 1999.
They have: 21 posts
Joined: Sep 1999
Actually, I was asking this question for ones who have their dedicated server hosted remotely (do not have physical access to the servers).
Paying for the host to swap, recycle, and keep storage of backup tapes could cost another (at least) $100/month, depending on how often you want to do it.
That's why I posted this question. Would it be good enough for small(-medium) businesses (bandwidth in/out of the servers is around 20-30 GB) to have just RAID?
With RAID, if somehow your primary hard drive fails, the second will kick in right away and your websites stay up. This will give you less headache than if you would go with the "tape backup" option.
With tape backup, yes it's really really nice to have. But when the primary hard drive fails, your site will be down for quite a while since you would need to request the host to put the most recent tape into the tape drive, then you'd need to recover data, copy into a new hard drive, etc...
In this case (server hosted remotely AND tight budget!), would having RAID be good enough and better than having the tape backup option?
Thanks! .. Any experience, or suggestion would really be appreciated
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