Ah yes, this morning our lab application has stopped working. Oh, well, 
the application itself is running just fine, but the Oracle DB behind it 
has stopped working. It claims it is unable to archive the online redo 
logs, and all the logs are now full.

This exact same thing happenes about a month ago. The reason? 
Unsufficient disk space.

Now, call me uncaring, but what the hell kind of server admin lets a 
mission-critical DB used by the whole company globally grind to a halt 
merely because it ran out of disk space?

Question: How much does an 80GB HD cost? How much does having 35 
scientists standing around unable to do any work cost?

Is it just me??

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> Question: How much does an 80GB HD cost? How much does having 35 
> scientists standing around unable to do any work cost?
>
> Is it just me??

No, we had the same here.  Our department got an email from the IT guys 
telling us we'd used up another *10GB* in the last month and this couldn't 
go on.  (Actually after they send out such emails it seems the free space 
actually goes *down*, I can't imagine why).  After much discussion it turns 
out that actually the problem is the nightly backup is sometimes not 
finished by the morning, not the lack of disc space.  Now they are 
considering backing up on to external USB hard drives.  It is really not 
very organised, they seem to have no real plan how to scale up their backup 
system in the future as inevitably everyone generates more data.

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scott wrote:
>> Question: How much does an 80GB HD cost? How much does having 35 
>> scientists standing around unable to do any work cost?
>>
>> Is it just me??
> 
> No, we had the same here.  Our department got an email from the IT guys 
> telling us we'd used up another *10GB* in the last month and this 
> couldn't go on.  (Actually after they send out such emails it seems the 
> free space actually goes *down*, I can't imagine why).  After much 
> discussion it turns out that actually the problem is the nightly backup 
> is sometimes not finished by the morning, not the lack of disc space.  
> Now they are considering backing up on to external USB hard drives.  It 
> is really not very organised, they seem to have no real plan how to 
> scale up their backup system in the future as inevitably everyone 
> generates more data.

Well, I don't know, saying "hey, we're getting near the limit here" 
seems more pro-active than just waking up one morning and finding that 
everything has come to a halt.

Also, adding backup capacity *is* more tricky than just adding more disk 
space.

I wouldn't mind, but I know the UK site generates about 700KB of redo 
logs per day. I don't know what the other sites generate, but it's got 
to me *a lot* of traffic for the server to fill up this fast. Either 
that or the server is _absurdly_ under-provisioned...

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Invisible wrote:
> Ah yes, this morning our lab application has stopped working. Oh, well, 
> the application itself is running just fine, but the Oracle DB behind it 
> has stopped working. It claims it is unable to archive the online redo 
> logs, and all the logs are now full.
> 
> This exact same thing happenes about a month ago. The reason? 
> Unsufficient disk space.

Ah, well, it appears this time the problem had a different root cause. 
So maybe I was a little uncharitable. But you'd think a server going 
down would page somebody, no?

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Invisible wrote:
> Question: How much does an 80GB HD cost? 

I couldn't say. You can't buy them that small any more here.

I was in the store yesterday and there was a 2TB drive for $129. Which is 
why I'm kind of surprised at Warp's reluctance to upgrade, unless it's lots 
more expensive on that side of the lake. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Invisible wrote:
> Also, adding backup capacity *is* more tricky than just adding more disk 
> space.

Yeah, back in the mid 90's, we had a system that was using the file system 
instead of a database. It took more than a day to scan it and do an 
incremental backup, just because it had like 50 million files in it, not 
counting the directories.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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>> Question: How much does an 80GB HD cost? 
> 
> I couldn't say. You can't buy them that small any more here.

I've seen a few people assert this. I'm not sure it's actually true.

> I was in the store yesterday and there was a 2TB drive for $129. Which 
> is why I'm kind of surprised at Warp's reluctance to upgrade, unless 
> it's lots more expensive on that side of the lake. :-)

I don't know what the exchange rate is currently, but I saw 1TB for £170 
or something. This is for an external HD, sold in a highstreet shop, so 
I'm sure it can be found cheaper elsewhere.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I've seen a few people assert this. I'm not sure it's actually true.

Let's say the electronics warehouse type store doesn't shelve drives smal
ler 
than about 160G, maybe up to 250G nowadays. Not in 3.5" size.



> or something. This is for an external HD, sold in a highstreet shop, so
 
> I'm sure it can be found cheaper elsewhere.

Yeah, I'm talking about a plain old 3.5" drive you'd plug into the comput
er. 
No box or external PS or anything like that. In any case, for £170 t
hey 
could solve their backup problems way cheaper than hiring someone to work
 
for a day cleaning things up.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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> Let's say the electronics warehouse type store doesn't shelve drives 
> smaller than about 160G, maybe up to 250G nowadays. Not in 3.5" size.

I go to ebuyer.com, and the very first entry in the catelogue (because I 
have it sorted by price) is

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131311

I will admit, however, that it really *is* just about impossible to buy 
40GB or 60GB drives any more.

>> I don't know what the exchange rate is currently, but I saw 1TB for 
>> £170 or something. This is for an external HD, sold in a highstreet 
>> shop, so I'm sure it can be found cheaper elsewhere.
> 
> Yeah, I'm talking about a plain old 3.5" drive you'd plug into the 
> computer. No box or external PS or anything like that. In any case, for 
> £170 they could solve their backup problems way cheaper than hiring 
> someone to work for a day cleaning things up.

Yeah, ebuyer has 1.5TB for about £80 (SATA).

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> I don't know what the exchange rate is currently, but I saw 1TB for £170 
> or something. This is for an external HD, sold in a highstreet shop, so 
> I'm sure it can be found cheaper elsewhere.

Like here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Elements-External-Drive/dp/B001GO9ERE

1TB for 62 pounds.  Almost 3 times cheaper than the high street!

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