I once has a installation *THIS* big....

Tbag

For all you gurus out there:

I'm facing the prospect of dumping 3.5 million files amounting to about 1 terabyte of data (almost all PDFs) into our single TS 6.5 server running on (gulp) Windows. Sounds like fun, right?

Assuming I absolutely have to do this, what are your thoughts? The biggest installation I've ever managed was about 750,000 files but only 600 megs or so, but that was on a Solaris box which I inherently trust more than Windows.

My first concern is branch size; I'm guessing I'd have to create some sort of "branch abstraction logic" to evenly distribute that volume of data over 100 branches or so just to keep branch-level operations to a reasonable time frame.

My second concern was with inodes, but I hope some clever disk formatting can support that.

Also, I was worried about TS cache size, but I don't think I need to be. If I did the math correctly, it's an average of 35K files per branch, which would mean I'd have to set the cache size setting at ~100K ==> ~128MB of physical memory which is no problem.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Bill Klish

To help on the disk side I would consider using a SAN solution from EMC or Network Appliance. For managing that kind of data load, the backup time using other options would be unbearable. Using the snapshot technology of these solutions (although very expensive) will keep your backup time in the minutes. It takes us about 1 minute to backup 30 GB here. Your volume is much higher, but I would think you could get similar performance.

As for the platform of choice, I wouldn't go the Windows route which you already know....

Not sure I can shed too much light on the other points, but I would open a support case and confirm your assumptions on cache size, etc.