[Technical] How do you store your users data?

Tue Jul 29 14:48:41 EST 2008

Thanks Alan and Jason,

I'll keep researching and speak to some consultants regarding our
specific requirements to ensure we get something that will suit us for
the long term.

Regards,

Paul Williamson
Huntingtower School
Mt Waverley, Victoria

-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Alan Oh
Sent: Thursday, 24 July 2008 03:19 PM
To: Technical Discussion in Schools Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Technical] How do you store your users data?

Hi Paul. Have you considered NAS boxes? A very cheap way is to use
FreeNAS (free linux software) and build a Raid 5 system with 1Gb network
card on a normal system.. www.freenas.org

I set one up with 4 1Tb SATA2 hard drives configured as RAID 5 used for
simple AV streaming of our library's collection of recorded clips.

Just a thought.

Regards

Alan Oh
Waverley Christian College
Tel: (613) 9871-8600 ext 605
www: www.wcc.vic.edu.au
email: oh.a at wcc.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: Thursday, 24 July 2008 2:59 PM
To: Technical Discussion in Schools Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Technical] How do you store your users data?

Hi Jason,

We have about 600 students and 120 staff.

I'm guessing your servers with 2 drives are configured in RAID1 and just
contain the operating system and software for that server?

The controller in our fileserver was around $700 and we get about
450mbytes/sec locally from it (of course limited by the network).
Perhaps if we used multiple network cards with a configurable switch to
provide higher bandwidth this would alleviate network throughput as a
bottleneck.

I've been looking at SAN's and it looks to be extremely expensive for
what it actually provides. What particular SAN solution have you set up
there and what made you go for it?

Thanks!!

Paul Williamson
Huntingtower School
Mt Waverley, Victoria

-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Jason Clarke
Sent: Wednesday, 23 July 2008 12:21 PM
To: Technical Discussion in Schools Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Technical] How do you store your users data?

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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