Bosco our current CDP server has been a little slow as of late and we anticipated this day would come we’re just surprised we’re already there. We have an agreement in place to have it replaced with a new system within the next few weeks. At this time we’re currently awaiting the availability of a 2U chassis that can handle the twelve 1TB drives we will be putting into the machine. The current machine is a four 1TB drives in raid-5 which was great when we originally had it deployed but we’ve doubled the number of machines we have. The new system will be using the twelve 1TB drives in a raid-10 to provide the write and read performance. This upgrade should mean much quicker backups and restores as well as extra space to handle double the number of machines we currently have.
Here’s a specs break down:
Old
Xeon 3060
2GB RAM
4x1TB Raid-5
New
Dual Xeon 5130
4GB RAM
12x1TB Raid-10
So it’s an upgrade all around but for backing up machines it’s mostly drive dependent but we figured upgrade everything a bit. Once we have a date when the new machine will be available to us we’ll be posting a maintenance notice to make the switch over.
So just another month and more hardware added. It feels like we’re constantly adding new machines with each one being of a higher specification than the old ones. As always thanks for everyone spreading the word about Hawk Host so we can continue to expand and add all sorts of new features and upgrade our hardware.
Just wondering if it might be better to have 2 backup machines – one in Dallas backing up data from servers in Washington and Seattle. And the second backup machine in Washington backing up data from Dallas servers. In this way, we have off-site data protection which is part of a disaster recovery plan.
Right now we have not hit a limitation on just how big of a backup machine we can create. For management purposes it’s much easier to have a single backup server handling our entire fleet. Not to mention the cost associated with doing so in terms of machines and licenses. In the future if we required another one we’d probably make it in another location. For now though we’re willing to take the small risk associated with having our backup system entirely based out of Dallas.
Our CDP server currently sits in a different room than all our other machines. It uses a different fcr than the other machines. The only potential for disaster would be if the facility itself was wiped off the map. This is a risk we’re willing to take right now.
And in addition to your backups, it’s always wise to keep a personal backup, just in case Dallas is wiped off the map (which, indeed, especially with a data centre, is an extremely small risk).
Yes, I agree…it’s a very, very small risk — but not zero.
The new server is now online and has backups of all servers and in some cases two days worth already. It’s significantly faster than previously and we should have the capacity for double the machines we have now if not more.
Wow…That’s a backup monster!
Bosco has transformed itself into BackupZilla!