Do it yourself NAS
Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer
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Q:
I was wondering if any of the small shops out there had built their own NAS or used a product like rebyte. I'm looking for disk to disk backup. Any tips or sources would be appreciated.
A:
We found some great suggestions in the Support Forums. Here's what we got so far. Feel free to add anything we missed.
- Marcel Cox: Actually, if you have a NW 6.x server, you can turn any computer with enough memory in a NAS by installing NetWare on it. In fact, starting with NetWare 6, you no longer have to purchase individual licenses for each server.
- Marcel Cox: The Small Business Suite version is limited in the number of servers you can install. But except for the licensing differences and the lack of clustering in 6.0, the SBS version has the same features as the full version of NetWare 6 and this includes software RAID.
- Dave Lunn: Buy an external SCSI enclosure and a drive big enough to hold the volume you want to back up and use the VCU (Volume Copy Utility). It's the fastest you'll get, cheap by comparison to tape and you already have the utility.
- Mateo: I have a cheap solution which in my case works very well.
Hardware requirements:
1. Two disks (size depends on quantity of your data and the depth of the archives you wish to have). I prefer disks of the same type and size.
Software requirements
1. Portal up and running iManager with ScheduleTasks (this is essential for running NWZIP in desired intervals)
2.NWZIP.nlm (free)
One disk needs to be mirrored into another. But you can use just two volumes, and play each archive twice, or, flip-flop the destination of your archive every day, (by Schedule Task and nwzip.ncfs of course.)
NWZIP needs to be run with different ncf settings. Each ncf contains settings of all parameters like: paths, range, deep, compression ratio, etc. The limit is a 2Gb zip file.
I am using mirrored disks, but don't like their behavior after the server forces switch-off. They need hours to synchronize again, causing high utilization at the server. I've heard others criticizing mirroring. However, 100% mirrored disks work perfectly and seem to perform just as fast as only one. (This is just another beautiful example of how NetWare understands HDs and handles them in comparison with some "Doors" masterpiece.)
Anyway, you need to consider carefully whether you will use mirroring, raid, or just separate volumes.
Bottom line: You have to study NWZIP, how it works and how to write NCF files for it. But once written, it works like a charm. Cost: two disks (and a little of your time and brain).
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