Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off?

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An essential part of our business continuity strategy requires that we duplicate and store data - lots of data.

We back up all our endpoints using Veeam Endpoint. There's no irreplacable data stored locally on the PCs, of course, but we wanted an easy way to move past a hardware failure, infection, or corruption. In the old days, we'd rebuild the PC from scratch. That took two people offline - the tech doing the rebuild and the person needing the PC. Today, Veeam Endpoint enables us to take less time and restore a machine more easily (complete with personalization, all installed applications, and desktop arrangement) with a few clicks. All those endpoint backups are sent to our storage server at about 35GB each on average.

Veeam B&R backs up our VMs to direct-attached storage on their hosts. That gives us the ability to do rapid restores and recoveries. We also move full backups off the host with a Veeam backup copy job. The target is our storage server. From there, they get written to tape for archival purposes. Add in mail archives and the IT file share (templates, ISOs, and so on) and the storage requirements get very large very quickly.

To accomodate our storage requirements, we've built storage servers for each campus. Nothing is stored on one of these servers that isn't originated or duplicated somewhere else. And there's nothing that, if lost, would directly affect production. With these constraints removed, we were free to concentrate on low cost and (frankly) having some fun while learning. As such, we built our own servers.

The Dell 2950 servers are old, but they're built like tanks. They feature 6 3.5" drive bays and don't really care what brand of drives you put in them. That makes inexpensive SATA drives a viable choice. To accomodate a single volume greater than 2TB requires removing the default RAID card and substituting an H700 - a simple swap. You also need two new cables to connect the H700 to the drive backplane. Here's our bill of materials:

9 3.5" disk sleds (we need 6, but it was nice to have a few spares) - $39.99

100 screws for the disks (no stripped screws, please) - $12.60

1 H700 RAID card with battery - $59.99

2 TrippLite S5120-18N internal SAS cables (really too long, but whatever) - $68.56

1 H200E SAS host bus adapter (for the tape drive) - $36.79

1 Dell PowerEdge 2950 III, 2x5420 2.5GHz CPU, 16GB RAM, 2 PSUs - $113.62

6 WD Red 6TB SATA drives - $1256.94

Total cost for 36TB (18TB usable in RAID10): $1588.49 (All parts bought on ebay in less than 30 minutes)

Once the parts arrive, it's as simple as could be to put them together. Remove the old raid, plug in the new, connect the cables, mount the drives, and poof, you're done! We use the BIOS RAID to create a 200GB virtual drive for the OS and allocate the rest as a single storage drive.

FAQ:

Q: What do you do if xxx fails?

A: We keep spares on hand. Excluding the hard drives, we have to spend only $332 to have a duplicate of every component. Because we have three of these in service, that's only $111 each for "warranty" with a 0-minute on-site part delivery. A spare is sitting in the rack now (minus drives).

Q: What if a drive fails?

A: We use our on-hand spare and then order a replacement.

Q: Why not just buy a NAS?

A: First, as mentioned, cost was the driving factor here. I also used the construction as an exercise to teach staff about server internals and maintenance - after all, they're expected to do the parts replacement. Finally, the result is much more flexible than a NAS. The server can act as a Hyper-V host for light-weight VMs (we can add RAM, if required) such as an email relay or syslog server. It can also interface directly with a tape drive so we can offload tape jobs from our production servers. Finally, if a NAS breaks, I'm waiting on someone else. This we can fix ourselves.

Q: That server is so old!

A: Yup. So am I. We both work great. ;)