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Originally Posted by dmk005 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Whaoh, mini data center. Do you have spare controllers on hand? Also, If your controller burns out, how does your replacement controller know how retain your configuration? |
Yeah, I splurged. Swapping Firewire drives was getting real old, and I was not sticking to my backup schedule in a disciplined way due to the inconvenience factor. I do have a 1TB (4x250GB in a single enclosure) LaCie FW800 drive, but it makes an incredibly annoying grinding noise and you just can't leave it on all the time. You want your backup system to be fully automated so you don't have to worry about it.
The Sun is not that expensive, about the same price as a new MacBook Pro, including the drives.
No controllers, it's all on-board SATA (they do use some form of backplane connectors, but those are probably passive). The RAID configuration is maintained by ZFS on the drives themselves. In fact, you can unmount a ZFS pool from one machine and mount it on another in a matter of seconds if you have some form of networked block storage like Fibre Channel or iSCSI. I migrated 1TB of home directories on my company's main server from one machine to another, in just two commands.
Solaris is not the most common OS out there, but Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will have both ZFS and an iSCSI initiator (client) when it comes out in October. Some NAS units like Adaptec's SnapStorage support iSCSI target (server) mode already, as do FreeNAS and OpenFiler, and the upcoming Solaris 10 update 4. I suspect the XServe RAID will be updated to support iSCSI, although the StoreVault S500 is already excellent for that purpose (both are too expensive for home use, however).
The beauty with having a NAS or server is that you can program them to run incremental backups over the Internet to another facility (or even do mutual backups) while you sleep, e.g. rsync or MozyPro. Given the slow upload speeds of DSL, it isn't fast, but sufficient for most purposes, and MozyPro is robust enough that GE selected them for their corporate desktop backups, for instance.