More disk-space options

Today I learned that Caminosoft has an HSM solution for Netware. Nifty, huh? No idea of pricing, through I fully expect that we're about half the size where it'd be a good idea.

We do have a couple of other options to reduce costs.

Veritas BackupExec Working Set


BackupExec has a newer feature in it called "Working Set". A "working set" backup is a backup of files modified in the last X days, where X is defined at job-creation time. For example, if X is set to 365, you only need full backups a couple times a year. That kind of thing.

This particular feature would allow us to cut down how much data we throw onto tape, and thus provide significant cost-savings. It won't cut down on how much disk is actually used, but it will save us on our backup costs. Usefull.

Novell Archive and Version Services


Documentation for this puppy: http://www.novell.com/documentation/nw65/arc_admin/data/front.html

This is a separate server that runs a versioning service against specified volumes. This is similar to Salvage, but both more and less robust. Unlike Salvage, versioning doesn't depend on how much free-space is left on the volume. Unlike Salvage, all versions of the files are not kept. Unlike Salvage, you can restore files from NetStorage.

This particular server would require a LOT of disk-space, since it would be providing version-control to most of our cluster. Since this space is by definition off-line, it doesn't have to be high-performance space; U160SCSI RAID would be just peachy. It would need another server.

The savings here would be that we wouldn't have to take daily backups in order to provide "oops" coverage to our users. This version control thing would handle that part of it. The backups go back to being a disaster-recovery tool.