In the meantime, Marsh said backups have been greatly improved. The IP-SAN does backup to tape and hard drives for offsite storage, and there's a complete 350-Gbyte backup of all seven servers on Friday nights, and then does incremental backups during the week"10 to 20 minutes per night, he said.
"We thought we had bit off a lot with 2.5 TBytes of storage space on the SAN," Marsh said, adding that the additional capacity gives him more breathing room when it's time to back up 350 GBytes. One thing he'd like to change is the way capacity gets doled out by the system. "If I have a 500-GByte user volume and I don't have enough left over to do a defrag, it would be nice to make it 600 GBytes, rather than add on another 500 GByte," Marsh said.
The system has been up for about six months and Marsh predicted it will be at least a year before he needs to add another array. "It's nice to not have users lined up at my front door," Marsh said. "That's allowed me to do other things that I always intended to do."
This story originally appeared on storagepipeline.com.
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