[Pc_Support] Drives, RAID, backups oh my!

[Damien McKenna]

I'm looking at ways to beef up our storage usage at work and have some
questions for y'all.

My first thought is regarding our data.  Right now we've traditionally
held almost everything on one server - Exchange 2000 for email, and all
our files, etc.  An effort began two years ago to migrate some of this
off but the process wasn't completed.  I'm planning to separate our
servers so we have one for our email and one for our files.  Right now
all of the servers are doing JBOD on either IDE or SCSI and I'm planning
on changing this to hot-swappable SCSI RAID-3/5/6 (depending on costs)
on both servers.  FYI we have about 16gb of email data and another 70gb
of other data, the latter of which grows faster than the former.

The second thing is that I'm considering is breaking up our backup
routine from doing a daily, complete backup of our data on one central
tape, to each server having its own consumer-grade IDE drive for daily
backups then do a once-per-week or once-per-fortnight backup to tape.
One of the ideas around this is that our data quantity has increased
beyond the amount of tape storage we have to the point where we're not
backing up everything we should.

Both servers run Windows 2000 (we may migrate to Windows 2003), along
with related software including Backup Exec 10 for backups.

So anyone have any thoughts, recommendations or other comments for any
of this?  What RAID cards do you suggest for doing hot-swappable
redundancy?  Do you think the backup idea would be reliable, or should
we just jump for higher capacity tape?

Thanks.

-- 
Damien McKenna - Web Developer - Damien.McKenna at thelimucompany.com
The Limu Company - http://www.thelimucompany.com/ - 407-804-1014
#include <stdjoke.h>