Backups Hardwares for FreeBSD

[Freddie Cash]

On October 23, 2007 02:24 pm you wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 01:38:21PM -0700, Freddie Cash wrote:
> > On October 23, 2007 09:34 am Paulo Fragoso wrote:
> > > We have a FreeBSD mail server with 1TB RAID 6 using Areca ARC-1220
> > > controler, all works fine.
> > >
> > > Today our backups are made on DDS-4 tapes, they are very slow and
> > > too small, this is our problem. What is a good (modern) alternative
> > > to DDS-4 working on FreeBSD?
> >
> > For our multi-TB systems, we do disk-based backups using dar ... to
> > another multi-TB system.  :)
> >
> > We use a custom shell script to handle creating full and incremental
> > backups and to rotate through multiple directories to keep a couple
> > backups around.  All via gigabit ethernet and NFS.  And once a week
> > we copy a full backup offsite via SSH tunnels to another multi-TB
> > system via a gigabit fibre link.
> >
> > We're using RAID5 with hot-spares on 3Ware 9550SX controllers.
>
> Any issues withe RAID5 sets on the 3Ware controllers?  I've heard bad
> things about RAID5 on older 3Ware controllers when a disk fails.  Just
> wondering if the situation is improved.

We've been using RAID5 on 3Ware 7506-4LP, 9500S, and 9550SX controllers 
from 3Ware without any issues.  When a drive dies, we use the web GUI to 
remove the drive from the array, replace the drive with a new one, mark 
the new one as a hot-spare, and then watch as the controller rebuilds the 
array with the new drive.  On the 7506 we have to power down the servers, 
but our big multi-TB systems have nice SATA hot-swap backplanes.

Haven't had any issues running FreeBSD 5.x (twe), 6.x (twa), or Debian 
Linux 4.x (3w-9xxx) on these cards.

Our largest array is currently 4 TB usable space (2x 2TB arrays combined 
via LVM).  Most of our systems are < 1TB.

-- 
Freddie Cash, LPIC-2 CCNT CCLP      Network Support Technician
School District 73                  (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
fjwcash+freebsd at gmail.com