NFS Question

[John Abreau]

Rich Payne <rdp at talisman.mv.com> writes:

> How many clients are you talking about? I would strongly reccomend 
> looking into some sort of network attached storage device. We use Network 
> Appliance machines. At my previous employer we started out with a pair of 
> Suns and hardware raid 5, then went over to the NetApps. They just serve 
> files for a living, and they do it well.

I'd have to agree with this. Once you get past the sticker shock, the 
NetApp appliances are awesome. I found them to be fast and reliable, and 
the snapshot feature is a lifesaver. At any point in the filesystem, you 
can access a read-only ".snapshot" directory to recover older files. 

If you delete a file, or overwrite it, there's a copy in .snapshot/hour0/
to recover it from. If I recall correctly, the system retains 7 hourly and 
7 nightly xnapshots by default. So you can always recover a file to its 
previous state from 1 hour ago, 2 hours, etc, and 1 day ago, 2 days ago, 
etc.

The snapshots are actually pointing at the same inodes that the main file 
used; if a file hasn't been changed for at least a week, then all the 
snapshots are sharing the same inodes for that file.


-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
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