6
Operating Scenarios.
6.1
Mon-Fri/Sun (Auto Changer)
In this scenario, the High-Rely unit is connected directly to a Windows server which is running
backup software on a daily basis. The user has multiples of their weekly backup sets in media. For
example, if they have a 5 bay to use for Monday through Friday, then they have (5 X) five times
however many weeks they wish to go back. If they are backing up Monday through Sunday then
they have (7X) 7 times. In this example we shall say the user has a 5 bay and has three weeks back
of media so he has 15 pieces of media.
Each of 5 pieces of media is given a different volume letter but those letters repeat for each set.
For example, there are three drives with the volume letter H:, three with I:, three with J:, three with
K: and three with L:. The Hs are all Mondays, the Is are all Tuesdays, the Js are all Wednesdays
and so forth. Thus, one weeks worth of media consists of 5 drives letters, H through L.
His backup software is programmed so that each night at 11:00pm it does a full backup. And on
Mondays, it does a full backup to H drives, Tuesdays are I drives, Wednesdays are J drives, and so
forth. Every Monday morning, he pulls the entire week's worth of drives and installs another
week's set.
Additionally, because windows does not like to assign different volumes the same drive letter and
will confuse them, he has installed High-Rely's free utility, HRDM2, to make sure windows assigns
the proper drive letter to each drive.
Hence, this type of installation only requires that the media is touched once a week. If the user had
a 10 bay device, the media would only need to be touched once every two weeks.
6.2
Mon-Fri/Sun with full backups periodically.
In this scenario, the user is using backup software with a "incremental" feature which allows it to
backup only data that has changed in multiple sets. For this example, the user has a 5 bay unit and
has 15 pieces of media. The user is doing a complete backup every week and incrementals during
the week. He has the software set up to place the incrementals on the same drive as the full backup.
Thus he need only change the media once a month and has 3 months worth of storage. His full
backup is approximately 400GB and his daily incrementals are about 10GB so he can easily fit an
entire week on a single 1TB drive. As in the first example above, the user is using HRDM2 to
make sure that drive lettering is not confused.
6.3
Backing up Multiple Servers
In this example, the user has a 5 bay unit and is backing up 5 servers to the unit. Like the example
above, he is using backup software with an incremental feature. The server the High-Rely is
attached to is sharing one of the 5 drives with each of the servers. Thus, share H goes to server 1,
share I goes to server 2, share J goes to server 3 and so forth. The backup software is loaded onto
each of the servers and is set to do a full backup once a week and incrementals for the rest of the
week. Again, HRDM2 is used as in the examples above to keep windows from confusing drive
letters. Also, the feature in HRDM2 to reactivate shares once a drive has changed is also enable.
Without this feature, each drive would have to be re-shared after it was changed.
The set of 5 media is changed once a week before the day of the full backups. Also, the backup
start time of each server are set to start well after the backup of the previous server has ended so that
12
Copyright © 2011 by Highly Reliable Systems. All rights reserved.
