network design

Hi,
i've been approached to install a new network for a medium sized business. they use a bespoke software package that contains a database of all there products and locations in the warehouse.

my only concern is which method to go with regards storage and backup/restore.

they use 1 windows 2000 server (5 years old) this i wish to change.
it houses a tape streamer this is there backup method.

there are around 14 workstations on the network.

i was thinking of using a new server with network attached storage with raid.
and keeping the old windows 2000 server as the backup machine and then backup to dat.
the most important thing is the restore time the server must be back online quickly as the store cannot operate without it.

anyone have any suggestions

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Comments

Trailerisf

Really depends on the amount of data you have and how far back you need to go to restore.

If you go past 30 days, you will need to merge the tapes back into the catalog before you can restore. So, that really takes a while.

You could try a few external harddrives as a cost saving approach but they take forever compared to running it internally.

If you have another machine you could run the backup jobs on it. You'd just need network shares mapped to it so it could run the jobs.

ajs1976

Trailerisf wrote:

You could try a few external harddrives as a cost saving approach but they take forever compared to running it internally.

Could use a Firewire800 drive, they are very fast for backing up to an external drive. USB2 good, but not as fast. Regular USB is to slow.

Trailerisf

But then again how many servers have firewire? :P

TheShadow

Depends on the market. In the game/engineering graphics and movie/TV business probably quite a few of them. Same goes for medical and general research as it replaced serial as a test equipment and data collection interface. A 400Mb/s 1394 PCI card is about $10 and a 800Mb/s PCI card is about $50. Should not take more than 30 mins to install. With all the Terabyte external drives starting to appear on the market in raid and non raid flavors it is more and more worth investigating as a secondary solution behind tape. Moving drives is still not viable for absolute safe off site and out of state storage using common carriers.