01 June 2010

Storage and Virtualisation in BIT-2A Datacenter

A while ago I bought a new Netgear NVX as my main storage device. The reason was that the 3 Intel storage servers that I had ran out of storage, where too slow and I had no way to backup them. This Netgear holds all my important data. All projects files from all songs I ever created and also the WAV exports from them. If I ever want to do anything later on with those songs I will need that data. But of course not only from my old songs, but also the stuff I am still working on. Loosing that data would be very bad as I already once discovered with my Classical project, that I had to postpone for that reason. I have been very busy moving and reorganizing all critical data to that Netgear and some less-critical stuff is still on one of the Intels. The other two Intels I use for local backups that I do every night of some of the data.

But still there was the risk of data-loss. What if my basement floods or the house burns down? So I wanted an off site solution for this. As you might know I run my own company (BIT) for a living where we operate 3 data centers in The Netherlands. Well in one of our data centers (BIT-2A) I have half a rack for myself. In that rack is (from bottom to top) a VMWare cluster with 3 Sun servers and an Intel machine for the management of that and an old Linux box for OOB serial stuff. On that VMWare cluster by the way also my Synth.nl website is running somewhere :) I also have a Netgear in that rack on top to hold the storage for that cluster. And guess what those Netgear support storage replication over the Internet. So now I'm backupping my Netgear at home to this one and the other way around. Kind of neat isn't it? Makes me sleep a lot better now :)

And to make the picture complete here is the back of the rack. There you can also see the two network switches on the bottom. One is a 100 Mbit Cisco that I use for the Internet side and management stuff. The other switch is a Foundry and is a Gigabit switch. There the storage stuff is handled and also the VMotion which makes it possible to move a virtual server from one hardware box (Sun) to another without any downtime. Pretty neat isn't it? You can also see my firewall there which is a Netscreen SSG140. So enough technical mambo-jambo. But if you are ever looking for a hosting company or datacenter in Europe or more specificly in The Netherlands just let me know ;) OK now back to music and synthesizer on this blog again.

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