Mass storage for Sun / Solaris

[ScottyUK]

We have a small network of about 24 Sun Ultra 1 and Ultra 2 workstations which form part of our turbine control system. One of the functions of these machines is to provide a 'Historian' facility - essentially a data logging function which records key turbine parameters to a 72GB disk. We have ten Historian machines, and when we recently lost one of these big disks it showed our backup policy for the shambles that it is: we're currently using multiple 4GB DDS tapes through manual backup process. You can guess the rest: one tape damaged, two missing, etc.

I'd like to add a mass-storage facility to one of the workstations, or add a dedicated workstation specifically for this function if necessary, to deal with our backups automatically.

I guess I'm looking for a tape library with an autoloader capable of taking 80GB native capacity tapes, probably on the second user market. Can anyone offer any advice on specific products which I should consider, or which ones I should avoid? Any other ideas would be very welcome: system admin isn't my full time job by any means, just something I seem to have acquired along the way.

We have plenty network bandwidth available for data transfer, and if necessary this can run all night. The O/S is Solaris 2.5.1 or 2.6 depending on the age of the machine. The Ultra 1 and 2 machines have SCSI internal architecture, and I have option of either a narrow or wide port.

Over to the experts!


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I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy it...

 

[MikeHalloran]

I've bought a few tape drives over the years, and never found one that was worth a crap. They all worked great ... until you actually tried to recover archived data from a tape they had written. As far as I'm concerned, the whole industry is a fraud, and always has been.

How about buying a case of big hard drives, and using them as if they were tape cartridges?





Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[IRstuff]

I saw a terabyte backup HD at Fry's last week. It's probably only marginal vis-a-vis storage capacity tho...

TTFN

 

[ScottyUK]

Yeah, I've been heading down the same lines myself. My tape experience has been pretty negative, although Sun tape drives seem much better quality than some of the crap in the PC market. You get what you pay for, as ever.

The disk idea is a good one, but these big SCSI drives are quite expensive and I'd need twenty of them: never overwrite your only backup copy! I've even considered a RAID, but the geography of the site means either ten small RAIDs or a very large central RAID with remote mount points and a lot of network traffic as a result. Not impossible, but since we just got the remaining bits of 10MBit network upgraded to 100MBit, I'll be really popular asking for another upgrade to 1GBit. The cost of ten RAIDs is high too.

Don't forget that in the early 90's and before Sun didn't understand the terms 'mass market', 'low cost', or 'compatibility'. Things are a little better now - much of the hardware is now standard PCI stuff. Not that I'm complaining about Sun quality - it is very rare to get a failure - but the older SBUS cards are getting rare and therefore pricey.

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I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy it...

 

[MikeHalloran]

There's no _physical_ reason for SCSI drives to be expensive, but apparently Adaptec is the only company in the whole damn world that knows how the interface actually works. Buying adapters or chips from anyone else is just a waste of money.

Not that I blame them, but they do take advantage of market dominance. Pretty much every SCSI device that actually works, i.e. has Adaptec chips in it, costs an extra $300 or so, just for the privilege.

Billy must be very jealous.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[richs]

Hiya-

You might think of a COTS (consumer off the shelf) system
with a 'nix system on it. The DVD drives will now hold
about 8Gb per disk. With an NTS system (have the COTS
system mount on the historians not the other way round.
If the cots goes down the historians would hang, if the
historians go down the cots will hang, but the historians
would still gather data).

The COTS could do a backup on the files on the historians,
*THEN* verify the files on the DVD drive(s). If error
then redo the DVD driver.

With hardware being so cheap these days, I could see that
there could be a couple of cots/DVD combinations so that
if one goes down, the other would also do the backup.
Might even consider using DVD read/writeable media, or
a halfway decent sized hard disk to recover from if
the DVD file(s) are corrupted.

Fill in the 'nix system with your choice. I would go
Linux. Others NetBSD or FreeBSD. As you are most likely
aware, Solaris is also available free for the PC
nowadays, so if you feel more comfortable with that
version of 'nix you have that path too.

I thought that the COTS systems were usually failure
prone 50% due to hardware 50% due to Windoze operating
systems. Over the past few years, I've noticed that
COTS hardware is pretty darn reliable, and have adjusted
my thinking accordingly. It was the operating system
most of the time that caused the crashes....

It is sometimes much more reliable to have many little
systems doing tiny little tasks rather than a big
machine doing many tasks. And it make it much more
attractive to have redundant systems.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Rich S.

 

[ScottyUK]

Thanks very much for the input Rich,

I hadn't really considered a remote mount for a PC running either Linux or even XP. That's a good possibility and means I can possibly share the business network's central backup facility. I will explore the options - the biggest problem could be political (Those engineers want access to the business network!) rather than physical. If all else fails I could set up a COTS system based on a standalone PC. Costwise, two PC-based systems are still likely to be cheaper than one Sun unit.

So far as the Unix O/S goes, Westinghouse patched Solaris quite heavily to configure their own GUI environment for the WDPF control system. That's why I'm running such old versions of Solaris.

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I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy it...