[arkay]

Originally Posted by ozGremlin

Hey Arkay,

In the spirit of a good arguement only....

Definately

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!)

Not sure I understand what you mean about single instance storage solution. If you mean all the storage needs to rest in one place and be accessible from anywhere then this would be accomplished with a storage array made up of motherboard SATA controllers only (array could be hardware or software in any flavour raid or even straight concats to use all the storage, or any mixture thereof dependant on the nature of the data). This would be structured in the necessary mountpoints that make sense and shared out via samba to any other machine on the network (either password protected or not, per share). The shares could be video, audio, photo's, personal files etc etc. They would map automatically from the MCE machine one configured within the MCE interface.

For "per machine" backup you would have a directory per machine (also mapped via samba), to which acronis true image is pointed to on a given client. Incremental images can be sheduled via the Acronis interface to write directly to the relevant share for that given client machine. This is of course more manual than the MS solution but just as effective and with a little scripting could be made to happen automatically.

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!)

True, raid can be inefficient but one wonders how MS can implement any form of redundant backup or irregular sized disks without losing some of that storage space. Simply put if you are managing copies of data then logically you have to have the same amount of space available to mirror it to. It would have to waste some space, somewhere. Hiding it behind a "it can do this" statement, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

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?

Yes you can.. and it's not hard to set up at all. That's exactly what I do right now.

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...

Agreed. It's not really THAT useful and is fairly limited in it's approach given modern technology.

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...

Fair enough but a home server is far from a corporate SAN in terms of level of technology, complexity of management etc. I can't see any of us needing a McData at home any time soon. With 750GB drives available now and bigger to come shortly it's quiet easy to set up a 4 disk system straight from the motherboard sata ports without the need for much complexity and this gives you quite a lot of space for a home server.

Cheers,

Arkay.