[Technical] How do you store your users data?

[Jason Clarke]

Hi Paul,

How many staff / students are we talking in total?

Because GWSC is large, we're having to resort to a Fibre Channel SAN
attached by Fibre Channel cards. We're able to move TB's of data around
relatively easily because of this.

We're moving more towards servers with 2 SATA HDD's (IBM servers) and
making large amounts of space available by the SAN.

That said, the most important part of the hardware is the controller.
Put in a $30 scsi/sata raid controller and you'll get $30 performance
(divided between your concurrent users.. ouch). Cache on controllers
makes a huge difference. Cache on the HDD's also makes a huge
difference.

Thinking about it.. Maybe purchasing a new server and putting JUST the
mandatory profiles on it would possibly free up a portion of the
read/writes that's hitting your file storage. Given that 1.5MB would be
cached reasonably well.

Then there is backing up of all of it (LTO3 auto changers, off-site tape
storage). Try explaining to users/admin about not spending money after
you've lost data. :)

Regards,

Jason Clarke
------------------
Network Manager
Glen Waverley S.C.
p 03 8805 6750
m 0418 145 318
e jcl at gwsc.vic.edu.au 


-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Paul Williamson
Sent: Wednesday, 23 July 2008 11:58 AM
To: tech at edulists.com.au
Subject: [Technical] How do you store your users data?

Hi,

I'm just wondering the sort of setup you use at your school to store all
of your students and staff files, how they access the storage and what
sort of backup/recovery you have in place.

I'll describe our fileserver setup:
Windows 2003 Server Standard
7 SATA Drives in RAID5 + 1 hotspare (gives about 450mB/s local speed on
the server) 
1GBIT Network connection to the core of the network
All files are copied over the network weekly to a backup server

I feel we are starting to outgrow our current set-up and would like to
hear how you store your users data. People are relying on computers more
than ever before so we need to get both redundancy and an increase in
speed happening.

We run a standard windows domain setup. All students use a mandatory
profile (1.5mb) hosted on this server, and then we have group policy
scripts which redirect their desktop and my documents folders to their
space on the fileserver. This means when someone saves a file on their
desktop, it is being saved directly to the server. With 100-150 users
logged on at once, the reads and writes per second are jumping between
10 and 130 and I suspect this could be slowing things down a bit.

Thanks,

Paul Williamson
Huntingtower School
Mt Waverley, Victoria



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