So HA it is
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@coliver said:
What's your bandwidth? Moving your entire infrastructure to an enterprise collocation site would probably be less expensive then building out a new server room with HVAC, generators, etc. @scottalanmiller beat me to it.
Scott may have said something, but your suggestion puts it in black and white. If you're boss isn't willing to put this in a DC, it's probably not worth spending the money on HA.
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I like the potentional not use a backup to get it offsite. I have not done the replication myself, but know another group that has. very little data replicating in each change.
They brought in the server locally, seeded the initial replicas, moved it to the colocation facility, and then let it catch back up.
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@JaredBusch said:
I like the potentional not use a backup to get it offsite. I have not done the replication myself, but know another group that has. very little data replicating in each change.
They brought in the server locally, seeded the initial replicas, moved it to the colocation facility, and then let it catch back up.
I've never done replication over a high latency wire. Not sure how it would work.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The next is the choice of storage, consumer or enterprise grade SSD's. Having a much lower weekly delta change for our shares than the daily delta for the consumer grade SSDs (which the write delta mark for the consumer grade SSD's is 20GB per day), so we have to ask: "Are enterprise drives really worth over double the cost of each SSD?"
Depends if they are part of the server support package or not, and if they will work with your controller or not. Often enterprise SSDs have special firmware to go with your hardware controller. The decision is holistic, not separated out to just consumer vs. enterprise.
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@JaredBusch said:
I like the potentional not use a backup to get it offsite. I have not done the replication myself, but know another group that has. very little data replicating in each change.
They brought in the server locally, seeded the initial replicas, moved it to the colocation facility, and then let it catch back up.
We replicate ours every 5-10min depending on the server. So we see little traffic from this.. Most of the time.
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@Dashrender said:
Scott may have said something, but your suggestion puts it in black and white. If you're boss isn't willing to put this in a DC, it's probably not worth spending the money on HA.
Or another way.... if your boss refuses to do HA, you can't do HA even if he requests HA
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@coliver said:
@JaredBusch said:
I like the potentional not use a backup to get it offsite. I have not done the replication myself, but know another group that has. very little data replicating in each change.
They brought in the server locally, seeded the initial replicas, moved it to the colocation facility, and then let it catch back up.
I've never done replication over a high latency wire. Not sure how it would work.
Latency does not affect replication. That is the benefit of it.
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@JaredBusch said:
@coliver said:
@JaredBusch said:
I like the potentional not use a backup to get it offsite. I have not done the replication myself, but know another group that has. very little data replicating in each change.
They brought in the server locally, seeded the initial replicas, moved it to the colocation facility, and then let it catch back up.
I've never done replication over a high latency wire. Not sure how it would work.
Latency does not affect replication. That is the benefit of it.
Good to know.
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@coliver said:
I've never done replication over a high latency wire. Not sure how it would work.
If it is async, hardly affects it at all. As long as you are replicating in the "minutes" range and not in the "seconds" range. High latency wire is normally no more than 300ms and 2,000ms tops.
Full Sync is super latency sensitive because every write has to be confirmed before anything continues.
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@coliver said:
Good to know.
It is basically just like transaction logging in SQL server. It writes the changes to a log file and then ships the log file. There is not a concern for latency. Obviously, you need to still have enough bandwidth for these changes. or you will always be getting farther behind, but because it is replicating, there is never a problem like a new full backup.
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Another point I made is that if we really need HA between the host that we could simply increase our existing XenServer (which also answers several of the above questions) to support these future Virtual Servers and configure a single new Dell R720xd for fail over between the two.
This idea was declined with "I'd rather leave that server for development VM's"
So there is still some critical things that still need to be thought out.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The next choice that must be made is what hypervisor are we going to use. XenServer or Hyper-V or lastly ESXi. As deciding this really refines our backup choices.
KVM would come in long before ESXi. ESXi would be like installing OpenVMS today. Just makes no sense on a new install. Costly and without benefits. Your budget doesn't allow it anyway.
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Dustin, what does your company do?
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@DustinB3403 said:
Specifically to try and find some pricing for Windstream, Amazon and BackBlaze as the top 3 contenders.
Windstream? Seriously? Why not just set the data on fire? That's not a business class company. They are infamous scammers and can't support their own links. Never do business with them, ever. They are so bad that they had to change their name to hide their bad reputation. As they are based around the corner from you, I'm shocked that anyone there would even allow their name to come up.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Another point I made is that if we really need HA between the host that we could simply increase our existing XenServer (which also answers several of the above questions) to support these future Virtual Servers and configure a single new Dell R720xd for fail over between the two.
This idea was declined with "I'd rather leave that server for development VM's"
So there is still some critical things that still need to be thought out.
Ask him why he wants a newer server for development stuff. You usually put your old crap for your labs.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Even though we couldn't possibly push a full month's backup (~24TB [this would comprise 4 weeks of full backups]) offsite it might be viable for the incremental backups. Which is what I now need to look into, and our weekly delta is low enough that we need to weigh the options of taking tapes / disks home weekly with the cost to restore from an online storage provider.
Most backup products will support a direct connection to cloud hosted storage so you do a one time full and then it can do incrementals for forever or whatever so the traffic and total storage is not that outrageous. But you need to work with that through the backup product and not as a separate decision.
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One of the biggest things here is that this decision, the plan, needs to be holistic. Which drives to use, which server(s) to buy, where to put them, having HA, the backup strategy, the fault tolerance strategy.... all of it is a single plan. It can't be pieced out as a bunch of separate pieces and then put together.
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So let's start at the very beginning. This is super hard as the goals are set by emotion, not by a business need, so there is no means to achieve the goal reliably. The true answer is, only the person emotionally driving the decisions can make any of the decisions because this is their personal desires alone and not an IT nor a business thing. So no amount of logic, planning, business, cost, reliability or math are going to actually matter.
HA is not needed, warranted, suggested or realistically possible. But it is not what is being requested either. The emotional driver isn't for HA but for something being called HA. We need to determine what that is and service the emotional factor, not the business or IT ones.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So let's start at the very beginning. This is super hard as the goals are set by emotion, not by a business need, so there is no means to achieve the goal reliably. The true answer is, only the person emotionally driving the decisions can make any of the decisions because this is their personal desires alone and not an IT nor a business thing. So no amount of logic, planning, business, cost, reliability or math are going to actually matter.
HA is not needed, warranted, suggested or realistically possible. But it is not what is being requested either. The emotional driver isn't for HA but for something being called HA. We need to determine what that is and service the emotional factor, not the business or IT ones.
So what's the question here? What does @DustinB3403's boss want from their systems?
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If we were really looking at HA, the first step is facilities. How do we get the facilities to a point where they can handle HA? Do we put the servers in a datacenter? Do we upgrade the existing facility to handle HA needs? Generally on premises can't do HA without a major investment.
The cheapest path to HA is an enterprise datacenter and good, redundant ISPs, in most cases.
