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Server Redundancy for a Small Business?
SadPenguin asks: "I am currently working for a small company of about 15 people each with one to two workstation/laptop machines a piece. We are looking for a new server solution, as our last one crashed, and lacking any server redundancy, we nearly lost all of our data since our last backup (it was only a few days, but an important few). What the kind of server (and redundancy) solution would be appropriate for a company of my size? Most advertisements are for large scale enterprise serving solutions, but these are costly and excessive for my situation. I'm sure that there is a simple Redundant Server technology out there that is a bit less costly, but won't result in any downtime in the event of a motherboard component failing (like we faced this time when our mysterious surface soldered VRM failed). So what do you use? What should I use?"
I work for a small company that only has three full-time employees (including me). I use two Debian boxes (cheap-o machines that are just retired desktops with some big cheap IDE hard drives in them) running Samba. I use the rsync mirroring technique I found here.
One box is the "live" server and the other mirrors the live server every night. If the main server dies (which happened once - power supply failure), I can "promote" the backup server by changing one line in its Samba configuration. As a bonus, the backup server keeps "snapshots" back a week or two.
I do three types of redundancy/backup at my sites:
* Mirrored Raid in all servers
* A regular workstation with a good, large had drive that copies the server data to itself nightly
* A DVD-RW backup made nightly on yet another workstation, with at least one off site - 5 discs, one each weeknight, replaced a few times a year.
In most cases the server RAID (cheap ATA promise controllers) takes care of 90% of the problems - only one HD goes bad at a time, lightning strikes rarely take out the hard drives at all, nevermind both hard drives, etc. Even if it dies it's unlikely that the problem affected the HD backup on the other workstation, and it definitely didn't affect the cd-rw.
However, whenever you get a catastrophic failure in any component in the server, replace the entire thing. If the MB or power supply fails, copy the data to new hard drives, and use the old ones in less critical applications, etc.
Much cheaper than an 'enterprise' solution, and it should be because your application doesn't require such a solution. Use large tape drives in place of the dvd-rw if you must back up a huge amount of data on a nightly basis.
This sort of solution is very tolerant of cheap hardware, so replacing the server later may not be such a major cost.
-Adam
We just finished building a 2.5 TB (terabyte) server for less than 5000$. You could probably spend even less than that since we spend about 1000$ on two fiberoptic cards. We have 2 6 chanel 3ware RAID cards and 12 250 133ATA Maxtors hooked up to a 520 watt powersupply plus another 520 watt power supply acting as redudant power(we did that mod inhouse). 2.5 TB is probably more than you guys will need unless you are doing some advertising or something like that... so you could probably go for 1 TB, which will cut your costs down even more. So all in all you could probably get it done in about 3000$ not too shabby for 16 ppl. Our server backs up my whole college.
.. get people into the habit of running CVS or Subversion client on "their documents" folders. Tortoise integrates right into Windows explorer. Advantages: file versioning, ability to work off line and still sync with the server later, etc.
if people actually work with plain text docs, they would love how CVS,etc will merge multiple users' changes.
Of course you would back up your CVS server but in case of a crash, chances are that very important file can be found on the desktop of the user who edited it the last time. Much better than relying on a network drive and then it is just not there.