Hey Arkay,
In the spirit of a good arguement only....
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Originally Posted by arkay
Quiet easily and exactly the same way MS will do it. A little client code on the attached machines with a mapped network drive to the server is all that is needed. That's why in the above post I suggested to use acronis trueimage in incremental mode as a scheduled task where the image is stored on the server drives. Acronis takes care of the incremental (read delta, versioned backups) and the server stores it.
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But your server still needs to be providing a single instance storage solution. Your backup solution also needs to be tracking which files belong to which client. I hadn't even thought about the "image using delta's" question, but I assumed that the latest generation "image backup" tools can all do this (Never used Acronis - but all the enterprise class ones can!)
Quote:
Originally Posted by arkay
Why do I not want to use raid? LVM under linux has more than enough power to configure any type of redundancy you require. You could use 2 of the drives mirrored for OS level (acronis from above), images, including the server OS itself. Fully redundant.
The rest you could stripe or raid5, whatever rings your bells. All as safe as houses.
In addition lvm supports the easy relocation of data, dynamic disk filesystem resizing, logical and physical disk install/remove etc etc. There's nothing it can't do in terms of adding, replacing or removing storage.
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Like you, I'm very comfortable with RAID, but as you well know, it has big fat hairy bits! It's not simple to change the RAID levels of an existing RAID set, it's very ineffecient at using randomly sized disks, and it does take skills and knowledge. A solution that simply ensures that every "shared folder" is present on two different physical disks is not as space effecient, but is both elegant and versatile! So too is removing the drive letters from the "storage pool" (I know this is very unix like - and a good thing too!)
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Originally Posted by arkay
Now, that's an interesting point. From what I've read about Home Server it's nothing more than a file server.
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Here we agree - Home Server seems to offer almost nothing to the MCE crowd, exept a potentially big NAS and an improved backup. Media streaming? Please... Cant we just map a network share and open the file using our favourite player?
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Originally Posted by arkay
What exactly needs to integrate into an extender? It has no tuners, it doesn't house guide data etc etc.. At preset you point MCE at a network share for videos, audio and photo's. It wouldn't be any different in this solution. Network accessible folders.. That's it.
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Agree on the integration with an extender. What I wanted was for the extender to act as a front end to an interface-less version of MCE running on my Home Server (With every tuner I could pile ino the box!) That does not appear to be where they are going. Myth on the other hand...
Quote:
Originally Posted by arkay
I see that statement as incorrect. MS is putting together a "solution" that they can market and sell that is in essence NO DIFFERENT to the basic function of any other computer on the planet. The only real benefit in this solution is the automation of backup of attached systems and the possible automation of adding additional storage. Something that is not difficult to manage with a few scripting skills and a basic computer knowledge.
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Don't agree on how simple that is. I'd get paid a lot less to manage storage networks if it were that easy!
As for Home Server being no different, I disagree on that too - there are some new features there that will be useful.
Your turn...