Network pics thread

dashpuppy said:
these, are huge, you can literally walk inside them! VERY dangerous too ! that arm MOVES FAST !

YFrRhh.jpg
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Evil prank: Go in there, swap 2 tapes around. :D


And damn, do those google hot isles ever get hot for sure. I converted and that comes up to 48C :eek: My furnace main plenum gets to around 55C for comparison. Yeah, would not want to be in there when the servers are on.
 
joshu said:
What the hell is that? Looks like something out of a SCI-FI movie :eek:
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Its a backup system using tapes all along the sides. a robot arm moves used tapes around and into a case at the end of a day for someone to take home with them as an offsite backup of Google.
 
Digital-Vortex said:
Its a backup system using tapes all along the sides. a robot arm moves used tapes around and into a case at the end of a day for someone to take home with them as an offsite backup of Google.
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Very cool! How much data can one of those tapes hold?
 
I can't imagine google really troubleshoots single hardware issues

I know microsoft doesn't, they said they lost money troubleshooting a hardware issue vs spinning up a new box since they modularized all their DC's and I cant imagine it wouldnt be the same for google
 
mikeblas said:
What's the point? They're identified with bar codes.
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Yes but it remembers what slot they're in. It would find that it's the wrong tape then have to reinventory the entire thing. I'm guessing these big libraries are smarter in that respect though. It would probably just rescan that tape and then rescan the old slot then determine the rest should be ok.

We had one of these at the hospital when I worked there:

sun_storedge_l700_tape_library.jpg


We did not touch it though it was another department. It was kinda neat to watch the arm inside randomly move tapes around. They used it to store Xrays and other DI related stuff. There were talking about decommissioning it since they wanted to just store everything on spinning disks (it was not used for backups, they had something else for that). There was always jokes about whoever gets to keep it will convert it into a beer fridge.
 
I don't understand the reasoning behind tapes anymore... a 4tb 3.5" drive is not much physically larger than those LTO tapes... just as (un)reliable... and similar cost/gb... when will we have giant hard drive libraries?

although its probably just cheaper to have them all online in giant arrays than all that fancy robot arm stuff
 
TapeRoom.png


Cool part about having a dozen or so LTO-5 drives in the tape room is that you can do really, really cool backup tricks like striping backups for crazy fast backup throughput from your fiber SAN.

RAID-0 or RAID-5 for your backup job? Sure!
 
couldn't you just replace the tapes in that library with hard drives? (obviously no as-is, on a similar setup) no expensive tape drives, no cleaning tapes or other headaches associated with tape...

I don't know, personally I will never use tape drives again for anything...

mandatory pic

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old but still good... G5 xServe and xServe RAID... use this for my off-site backups at my friends data center... the machines above and below are not mine... who would pay to put those things in a DC is beyond me lol
 
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Tapes are a strange thing as your company grows you grow out of tapes but if you company continues to grow you end up going back into them! At the mid range enterprise setup tapes are a pain, SAN replication and snap shots are much better but as the company gets larger tapes at the scale in the picture become viable again.
 
I never understood tapes either, they are insanely expensive (especially the hardware, even a single non robotic tape drive is in the thousands of dollars). You can setup a nice backup rotation using lot of 3TB cheap drives for much much cheaper than a tape solution, and what are the odds that a drive fails AND you need to restore from it? To be safe just duplicate everything. They need to make HDD libraries, that would be awesome. There is a certain advantage to having backups that are "turned off" so I see one of the reasons for tapes but the same can be achieved with hard drives especially if they made libraries that work with HDDs.
 
Anyone remember the scene in the movie Eraser when Vanessa goes inside the secure room to access top secret weapons blueprints? A robotic arm moves some tapes around as she accesses the files.
 
hard drives and tapes are not equal for backups. Tape is a long term storage method. Hard drives are not. Snapshots and SAN replication are not backups either. I hope none of you are systems admins if you believe these things.
 
have you tried doing a tape restore?

I have... I'd say you have a 50/50 shot of the tape actually working... especially "long term"

from DDS to LTO I have used them all, and *HATE* them all...

you want real long term storage you go to something like MO (although the cost/gig on that is astronomical)
 
schnell said:
hard drives and tapes are not equal for backups. Tape is a long term storage method. Hard drives are not. Snapshots and SAN replication are not backups either. I hope none of you are systems admins if you believe these things.
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How are replicated snap shots of DFS servers not backup?
 
Use tapes for offsite backups. you don't want to send a huge box full of hard drives with the iron mountain pick up person every day. They're also pretty much the best option for archival backup, they last a long time. Also, robotic tape libraries index the barcodes and keep track of tapes, not as easy with hard drives.
 
If the budget allows, just build another datacenter and get 50gbps of dark fiber leased in-between. Replicating SANs are cool.

...If the budget allows...
 
We have 2 datacenters and a DR site plus about 8 racks at head office. We have no tapes at the moment but we are probably too small for a large tape library.

We have about 2000 blades and about 300tb of useable space across a number of netapp heads. It's the most complex network I have ever seen

I found a Fas 2050 not in use and was allowed to build a test VMWare cluster with a few unused servers with 64gb of RAM in each!.

I wish I could get ny hands on the nexus switches though!
 
haunter said:
nice stack of iphones
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I ordered 28 iPhone 4's, 1 iPhone 4S, and one iPhone 5.

That's 27 iPhone 4's, my 4S is in my hand and a 4 went to my tech. Also the iPhone 5 is on back order. :)

So that's what $12,000~ worth of iPhone 4's looks like. :p
 
FLECOM said:
have you tried doing a tape restore?

I have... I'd say you have a 50/50 shot of the tape actually working... especially "long term"
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Whike kind of broken setups are you using that your tapes don't work? :) Something like this, perhaps:

tape-backup.jpg


:D :D

If you tape doesn't restore, you are doing/storing it wrong.


Berg0 said:
Use tapes for offsite backups. you don't want to send a huge box full of hard drives with the iron mountain pick up person every day. They're also pretty much the best option for archival backup, they last a long time. Also, robotic tape libraries index the barcodes and keep track of tapes, not as easy with hard drives.
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This. I'll happily put a set of tapes into a blue box and ship it off to iron mountain to store for years, knowing full well that the box will be dropped and manhandled not-too-gently. Never in a million years would I trust a van driver to handle a hard disk gently.

Drop a tape? you'll probably be fine. Drop a hard disk? Not so much. In addition, many regulated agencies require long-term offsite storage that becomes impossible to do with hard disks.

schnell said:
hard drives and tapes are not equal for backups. Tape is a long term storage method. Hard drives are not. Snapshots and SAN replication are not backups either. I hope none of you are systems admins if you believe these things.
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I agree. The argument of tape/no-tape is eerily similar to the "RAID is not backup" issue that pops up on tech forums all over the internet.
 
Brak710 said:
If the budget allows, just build another datacenter and get 50gbps of dark fiber leased in-between. Replicating SANs are cool.

...If the budget allows...
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...and then your snapmirror replicates messed up data to your filer at the colo and all your data is wrecked, and your snapshots don't go back far enough to restore. That's when you go back to tape.

I have two datacenters, have the budget, still use tape. I actually do disk to disk to tape. I keep a large DAS array to stage my backups before writing to tape.
 
Jay_oasis said:
How are replicated snap shots of DFS servers not backup?
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Because if you accidently overwrite a file on server A, it gets overwritten on Server B and if you don't notice it for the 48-hours or whatever your snap retention policy is, now you have two broken files instead of a broken file and a good file backup.

If you have enough SAN space to retain multiple snapshots for 30+ days, I want to work for your company... :)
 
FLECOM said:
have you tried doing a tape restore?

I have... I'd say you have a 50/50 shot of the tape actually working... especially "long term"

from DDS to LTO I have used them all, and *HATE* them all...

you want real long term storage you go to something like MO (although the cost/gig on that is astronomical)
Click to expand...

I dont like tapes at all either, but I will say we really have not found another alternative.

Spinning disk is not that cheap once you factor in all the environmentals to run a spinning disk setup at the size required (power, cooling, host machines, etc.). This does not seem like much with a drive here or there, but when you are running hundreds or thousands of them it really adds up.Also your normal off the shelf consumer SATA drives do not have the thru-put a good tape setup on a fiber fabric can push.

I will say our tapes are much more reliable than 50/50 over the long term, and MUCH more reliable than spinning disk.

I think the problem is like was stated, tapes suck at a certain size, but then become about the only option once you get big enough again. We dont use Tape for single restores or individual files, its when we are restoring multi-TB databases or email journals.
 
Berg0 said:
assuming he means off contract.
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Yeah I was estimating list price without contract. I don't like listing things by contract price. Because you obviously have that cost paid via the contract itself, so it's still the same. They were actually all free under the contract. Except the 4S $99 and iPhone 5 $199. So either way it's $12k worth of iPhones.
 
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