[OpenAFS] OpenAFS for often mirroring/back ?

EC wingman@waika9.com
Thu, 7 Oct 2004 12:07:50 +0200


Hi,

I was wondering if is it best to use AFS for my mirroring/backup system, and
if so should I use replication/backup or other tools?

Here is my 'problem' schema:
 
          |  +----------+  |
+------+  |--|fileserver|--|
|client|--|  +----------+  |
+------+  |                |
          |  +----------+  |
+------+  |--|fileserver|--|  +----------+
|client|--|  +----------+  |--|    big   |
+------+  |                |  |fileserver|
          |  +----------+  |  +----------+
+------+  |--|fileserver|--|
| ...  |--|  +----------+  |
+------+  |                |
          |  
        .....

AFS makes the fileservers data available to my clients. I have X clients. Y
file servers. X < Y. There is 1 big server. clients need writing more often
than reading so they need rw/access most of the time. Big server is supposed
to be the fileservers backup system (I do not mean AFS backup system) and
should not be used by clients in anyway. Clients to fileserver will be heavy
traffic.

My question : is AFS adapted to mirror/backup the fileservers to the
bigserver ? I would like to mirror data *at least* once a day without making
service unavailable. I find using other tools (unison and such) as a sad
option since AFS does seem to work great. should I use replication (not
really suggested by the documentation) ? backup (bigserver is not a tape..)
?

Many thanks if you can help me..

EC.