[Discuss] Dev Ops - architecture (local not cloud)

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

Kent Borg wrote:
> Maybe because I was young and impressionable during the early personal
> computer era, it seems better to me to give users their own hardware
> rather than servers...unless there is a real economy of scale that kicks
> in for the server.  Now that the PC era is coming to a close, this might

What do you do for backups and long-term archives? How do you ensure 
that, for example, every user leaves their workstation turned on 24/7? 
Answer: you can't. This is an actual issue that I have with a group of 
users. Regardless of what they're told, regardless of labels attached to 
their workstations, they shut them off when they leave their offices. 
These workstations are never backed up because they can't be backed up. 
We could implement local backups for these users however, beyond a 
certain point this becomes more costly than a centralized system.

Users' AFS home directories? Backed up nightly, all automatic except for 
swapping in new tapes every month. It costs nothing to add more users 
and workstations to the system since we haven't reached absolute capacity.

I generally prefer AFS to NFS. It has a much better security model. It 
uses a local cache for improved performance. It has a robust snapshot 
and backup mechanism built in. Pretty much anything bad one can say 
about NFS is addressed in AFS.

-- 
Rich P.