[ale] Topic ideas for November meeting

[DJ-Pfulio]

On 11/03/2015 08:20 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> Funny.  Here we did that and were accused of "hiding disk space".
> They couldn't see why you'd want to keep space in reserve until
> needed even though they were specifically asking for a new filesystem
> that we couldn't have built if we hadn't done it the way we did it.

How much did their project purchase?  As administrators we know $200
buys a 750G SAS disk, but not:
* installation + cables
* configuration
* backups (daily, weekly, monthly, annual, "fulls")
* offsite storage costs
* DR storage
* WAN to push all that data
* RAID ports (if any)
* replacement backup tapes
* shipping
* warranty

I recall a non-trivial tape drive and tape media estimation spreadsheet
and buying hundreds of tapes and 5 LTO drives for a relatively small
amount of storage. Why 5 drives? Backups had to finish in the allowed
time. Also had to buy new switches for the backup network  because we'd
already used all  the available sw-ports.

If "withholding storage" is what the end users want to call it, fine.
Have them provide the budget to provide those things for the additional
storage to be brought online.  A quick guess is $8K.  Truly a guess,
don't quote me.

Personally, if I cannot backup the storage properly, I don't want it
available. PERIOD.  Users will always say that area will only be for
scratch stuff, but a month later it has critical files.  A month after
that, when a disk crashes and all that data is gone, it doesn't matter
who signed the non-backup risk-acceptance paperwork. It is still our fault.


> -----Original Message----- From: ale-bounces at ale.org
> [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Phil Turmel Sent: Monday,
> November 02, 2015 7:17 PM To: ale at ale.org Subject: Re: [ale] Topic
> ideas for November meeting
> 
> +100!
> 
> I also always leave the bulk of the PVs unallocated until I know the
> usage pattern.  And even then I leave some for emergency resizing.
> 
> On 11/02/2015 06:46 PM, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
>> My rules on this are simple. a) ALWAYs use LVM on physical
>> systems. b) NEVER use LVM on VM storage (inside the VM).
>> 
>> In 20+ years,  I've never been able to guess correctly the amount
>> of storage needed for any specific partition. Being able to resize
>> LVs without rebooting is FANTASTIC! That's just 1 little thing.
>> There are many others. I love that formatting an LV with ext4 is
>> basically instantaneous, regardless of the amount of storage.
>> 
>> In this I equate LVM == ZFS == BTRFS. Enhanced volume management is
>>  the goal. No need to be tied to some hardware limitation that MBR
>> or even GPT force onto us.
> 
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