Who we are:We are an innovation company in Detroit that tackles life's greatest challenges and develop products that reach millions every month. We have no debt, no investors and hire the best and brightest from all over the world.
Our HQ is in Detroit, but we also have workers all across the globe. We spend a lot of time and effort to create documentation and research, and in doing so we have amassed terabytes of data that is housed locally and in the cloud. We have a large fleet of drones, along with Red Dragon camera and brushless gimbals.
The Vision:We want to be able to leverage footage we shoot without having to worry about running out of space. Our editors know where stuff is stored, and assets are easy to find. Things that are stored to tape are reliable, easy to recover with 100% data integrity. Our LTO tape system is configured correctly and we don't need to constantly maintain or monitor it because it just works as it's supposed to.
What we have:
- Overland 48 slot LTO system with 2 LTO-6 drives
- 100 LTO-6 tapes
- Archiware P5 installed on Ubuntu server (dedicated box) with SSD
- Mac mini setup as a server, with 2x 28 TB DAS RAID Arrays (Areca & Pegasus)
- 10 gbps connections from editors, mac mini and LTO tape server
- VMWare virtual server infrastructure
- 2x 2015 Mac Pros for video editing
- GRAIDs and other external drives to temporarily save footage
- 40 TB FreeNAS business storage
- 100 TB FreeNAS archive storage
Background:
- LTO server (archiware) has never been configured well
- We wrote a lot of stuff to archive on tape but it wasn't deleting from the source
- We used the tape system to backup our business files
- We hired a consultant to redo the tape system, and he recovered all the data from the tapes and did a fresh install
- After checking, we found there were some things on the tapes that were not recovered
- Archiware is still not configured well, nor is it currently being used
Challenge:How can we get everything off the old tapes, verify it, and setup archiware the way it works best for us? How can we set it up so we don't need to babysit it constantly? How can we make things faster and more efficient?
Goal:
- Archiware is setup correctly
- We have 100% of all data that were on the tapes
- Archive / Backup jobs are logical and working correctly
- Fast as possible
- Support responds rapidly if issues arise
- Maintenance is taken care of
Requirements:
- Recover all data from our tapes
- Configure Archiware to make use of backup and archive features
- Make sure automatic cleaning works
- Create backup and archive plan so we know what tapes need to be onsite/offsite
- Ensure everything is redundant
- Configure jobs and set the schedules
Let's make use of what we have, identify what we need and solve this problem the right way so we don't have to revisit this in the future. Do you know of anyone who is an Archiware jedi?