> I wouldn't even look that far. Backups are for a last resort. If you have
> mission-critical storage needs, parity and mirroring are a bare-minimum
> requirement. And by your numbers below, it's quite a bit cheaper to have
> arrays of mirrored disks and standbys compared to spending $136k on a
> software license that still can't completely save you from a hardware
> failure.
Parity and mirroring are nice, but they don't always save you. Our
machine room used to flood every now and then; it's hard to use parity
bits to recover from that.
But yeah, Disk Is Cheap(tm). A bunch of extra disks and a tape drive
will run less than $136k, and I'll sleep a whole lot better at night.
> Application-level support is certainly a bonus, but I'd have a hard time
> believing it's a requirement for the project being discussed here.
Right; there's no off-site backup system quite like mirroring your
code to dozens of servers across the world and sending patches to a
mailing list with thousands of readers.
--nat
-- nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs magus@cs.cmu.edu -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/ there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/