Another Iz failure last week forced us to start implementing this plan. We did so by setting up Rosa in the rack to backup all rack servers. This has been in place since last Friday.

In addition, we had a major break through in our backup planning last week with the contribution by member group Interactivist of a Xserve with four hot front loading hard drive trays. Woohoo! They even took low cost Parallel ATA drives.

So, this morning I trotted down to J & R and purchased four 500 GB PATA drives and headed to Telehouse.

When I arrived, I realized that only one of the hard drive slots had a proper tray. The other three trays were just place holders. Hm. I returned to J & R to learn that they don't carry the trays. Called the Apple Store. No luck. Call Tekserve - yes, they have them. No, they don't just sell the tray itself, they sell the tray and drive as a module and the 500 GB module cost $699 (I bought the PATA hard drives for $159 each). No thanks. Went on Ebay and the trays alone were going for $170 - $220 each.

Ok. Scratch that idea.

Here's a new idea:

Currently, Assata is under utilized. I think we should:

• setup the two new Dell servers we've purchased,
• dedicate on Xen instance from one of these servers to take over for Assata,
• Install three of the four 500 GB hard drives in to Assata
• Sync all the data on the rack to Assata
• Take Assata backup home as the off site backup server

At this point, we'll have one server in the rack and one server off site. We'll be close to capacity on the rack server, so we'll need another one to be installed, however, we'll have a few months before that project becomes critical.

--jamie