Ultra high-speed link between servers
 

At the moment, I backup all of my servers to one machine (JANUS), an old desktop with a 250Gb hard drive. This machine is used for staging, and I usually do a weekly backup to DVD.

I'm upgrading a few servers to Proliants, and have a 75Gb tape drive in one of them (STOR1).

Now, I'd like my weeklies on tape, but am not sure that I want to change the entire backup system to use the new server as the master.

The total backup of all machines is ~6Gb, so this is a very large hit on LAN bandwidth.

Unfortunately, it is not an option to add a SCSI card to JANUS.

Any ideas on a high-speed interconnect between JANUS and STOR1 for transferring the data? Gigbait copper? Some fiber method?

The cost should be low - I don't mind lightly used parts, but I want it to be in the $100 rage, with an absolute max of $200.

So, what I'm asking for are any suggestions for the technology to accomplish this. Also, I considered the idea of getting a gigabit copper switch, so that I could also add cards to the other servers, and have a dedicated LAN for backups, to keep that traffic off of the working (100 Mbps) LAN.

Just looking for some input, as I don't know much about high-speed networking, and definitely don't know about anything other than copper Ethernet.

Thanks.

hi,

at what speed do you want your backups over the line? E.g. 5 minutes? Or faster.. (which will cost more..., the first one could be free)...

recently i was looking at the web100 project which gave me the performance i needed on a 100 mbit local network..


regards
mark

My switch already handles multilink trunking.

I'm looking for options in the 500 Mpbs - Gigabit range. Perhaps higher, though 10gbE seems so new that there's no reasonable used equipment.

i usually create a separate gigabit connection to handle transfers like that. basically you could install gigE nics in both JANUS and STOR1 and connect them via cat6 and a 4 - 8 port gigE switch. You could then specify the appropriate ip address (the ip of the gigE nics) in your backup scripts, so all traffic would go over that small gigE backend and not your LAN. All together it would probably cost you around $100.

Thanks. That's what I was thinking, and what I'll probably end up doing.