My MacPro arrived yesterday. I’m not going to get an opportunity to actually set this beast up until sometime later this month. I also got theokay to purchase 2 x 20″ LCD monitors & the RAM upgrade to accompany the MacPro. I have a couple of other things that need to get ordered before the end of the week. Spend, spend, spend…
I’m currently working on backups & SAN snapshots. We’ve been slowly building a snapshot empire. First they were being done manually, then I scheduled them on a daily basis, then a 4-hour interval. With the exception of Storage, all of the SAN volumes are on an hourly snapshot interval, retaining 3 (or 4). In addition to that, I’ve also created daily snapshots for all (once again, sans Storage). I need to factor how much additional space I would need in order to maintain 5 days of Snapshots for our largest SAN volume.
Not only are we taking hourly snapshots, but we’re also coping them to a 2nd location, a 2nd SAN if you will… Changed data for the majority of our volumes is under 1 Gig, excluding Storage. It never ceases to facinate me the kind of trend analysis one can see just by taking a look at the amount of changed data Mail (and other volumes) experience in a few hours over the course of the day.
There are a few instances where the size of our snapshot was insufficient to hold all of the changed data on the volume; not to worry though since the SAN has thin provisioning and an “Auto Grow” feature that pretty much guarantees we won’t be running out of space on the volume, just so long as we monitor it on the system and SAN.
I am still concerned that the rate of change is too much to transfer, however Aaron and I looked at network utilization on the switch and it turns out that we barely break 10% utilization during my backups to tape. However there are still a number of snapshots that don’t get copied over because the previous one before hadn’t finished by the time a 3rd snapshot is taken.
I’m doing a lot more, I just don’t have my thoughts together enough to coherently write about them at the moment.
Laters…