New Online Backup Servers
There is a new and exciting thing happening here at SecureBackup LLC and I wanted to share it with everyone.
We are planning on providing all customers with RAID redundant online backup servers. We are going to accomplish this by building, maintaining, and co-locating our own backup servers at a data center in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Currently we are leasing dedicated servers from a data center in Houston, TX. While this has been a great solution so far, it has somewhat limited us in terms of our online backup service offerings. We know we can offer a better service by building and maintaining our own servers.
We have been very pleased with the initial test results of our new online backup servers. Because of the fact that we can now choose our own server parts, we will soon be able to better monitor the health of our servers, anticipate and prevent problems, as well as provide RAID redundancy.
Monitoring servers is an important task in the world of online backup server administration. By monitoring things such as fan speeds, CPU temperatures, and hard drive errors, you can anticipate potential problems down the road and take corrective action to prevent it. Our new server grade motherboards provide built-in support for monitoring certain aspects of system health.
We will be able to determine if a hard drive is failing and can replace it before it happens. And because we will be building RAID redundant backup servers, if one drive actually fails, the data will still be secured on a secondary drive.
One of the methods that we will be using for monitoring hard drives is called S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. With S.M.A.R.T. monitoring we will be able to better predict potential drive failure and can take corrective action immediately. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring isn’t a bullet proof solution and a hard drive can fail without warning but it is a good first line of defense.
In addition to S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, we will also be able to monitor the health of our drives with our new RAID configurations. We are planning on using RAID-1 mirroring for our new servers. This will not only alert us of a failing drive, but will provide redundancy if that drive actually fails.
RAID-1 is our method of choice. While RAID-5 is great for storing multi-terabytes of data, the best choice for online backup with multiple GB of data is still RAID-1.
We look forward to deploying our new online backup servers and offering RAID redundancy to all SecureBackup customers. We will issue an official press release when we roll out the new servers.
