SAN Backup

[Eric Hansen]

hey Marcus

I’ve never used BRU Server, but i can tell you that PE (Producer’s Edition) is way different and designed for creative professionals specifically. it’s not perfect (nothing is), but it’s got an easy drag and drop interface.

regarding putting hard drives on a shelf and spinning them up every few months: i recommend 2 or 3 sets of bare hard drives to my lower-volume clients for project storage, similar to what you’re doing with your RAID-5 external drives. the difference is that EVERY SINGLE ONE of my clients never spins their drives up regularly. this is when i start to recommend tape because you don’t have to do regular maintenance that everyone says they will do, but never do.

hey nick

please keep us in the loop on what you decide to do.

thanks

e

Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Nick Hasson]

I went very low tech. I looked Into all the great things that people suggested. In the end I did not spend as much as I thought. I bought a drobo pro and 8 2TB drives. This was about 3k for the drives and drobo. As for backup software, I decieded to go low tech as well. I use the rsync command line tool to every ignt sync my raid to the drobo. This works great for me. I’m a one person shop, so I did not need anything crazy. All the macs I have get there system drives backup up by time machine to another drive.

Low tech and maybe cheap. But it works for now. One day I’ll upgrade to something fancy.

Nick Hasson
Smoke/Color
http://www.niceedits.com

[Steve Knattress]

Hi All, I posted this in the fcp forum a couple of days ago, but feel I may get an answer from you network people here.

I have a drobo pro at home to use as general backup and somewhere to transfer hours of cycle head cam footage.
I have a fw800 g-raid2 and small sata raid 5 array for “real” editing on my macbook pro.

The drobo pro was successfully connected to my macbook pro using iscsi on my home network ( iscsi and internet via a time capsule. In a separate room),
I gave the Drobo a manual Ip address outside those allocated by the TC)
I was able to edit DV from the drobopro without any problems over my home wired network.

until.. I loaded drobo dashboard onto my wifes’s imac, to do a backup via isci
Now the drobo pro is reluctant to connect to my macbook pro. (does not connect when my wife’s mac is on. (drobo dashboard (which was given same drobo ip address as mbp, )is NOT being run on boot. more often than not will not connect when the imac is off.)
How do I select which of my computers on my network talks to the drobo pro via iscsi. (I know its not NAS and that only one computer at a time can be “connected” by iscsi

I assumed that the drobo would connect to the machine that had the drobo dashboard running ( I assume this is what loads the iscsi mac agent? …but this does not seem to be the case.)

A lot of assumptions I know. Has any one else experienced this?

Thanks Steve

[Dave Klee]

Hey Steve, you’ll probably have to completely uninstall all Drobo software from your wife’s iMac, and might consider plugging the DroboPro in over FireWire 800 if you’re working on a MacBook Pro.

There are a couple big things at play here:

First, when you install the DroboPro software, it goes through the zero configuration iSCSI setup to make your DroboPro “magically” connect to your computer (I don’t think whether the Drobo Dashboard is running or not matters — the iSCSI connection is constantly working in the background independent of the dashboard software). So, whichever computer you installed the Drobo software on last is probably the only one that the DroboPro will connect to when it’s on. Completely uninstall the DroboPro software from the iMac (probably by running an uninstall program because dragging the Dashboard app to the trash won’t do it), and things should go back the way they were.

But more importantly, I’m not sure that running the DroboPro over iSCSI through a router mixed with normal internet and home network traffic is technically supported. I didn’t think it was, but I don’t know everything about it. Often, all iSCSI traffic runs on its own, dedicated ethernet port (for example, a computer will dual ethernet ports might have one dedicated to all iSCSI traffic, and another dedicated to normal network and internet traffic).

You might be better off connecting the DroboPro over FireWire 800. Even if running iSCSI through your home network is technically supported, the speed tests between iSCSI and FW800 on these things isn’t terribly different. And you might even see a speed increase because your home router is probably not optimized to pass that kind of bandwidth-hungry, video-based iSCSI traffic.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

Dave

[Steve Knattress]

Thanks for your reply Dave.

I can now talk to my Drobo Pro over iscsi again.
I connected my Macbook pro via FW800, then set up the manual ip address again to the Drobo.
(there is no iscsi set up via ethernet only by FW or USB)
It now taks to my Macbook pro over scsi again.
The dashboard is still on my wife’s imac.

The trouble my Drobo is in another room adjacent to the time capsule router, so it is easier to connect over the network at the moment.

I find that for backup work and the odd bit of DV editing the drobo works fine over my normal network. Although when I’m working with the drobo there is very little extra network traffic.

When I get a chance I’ll do some speed tests.

Steve