We have 3 Sun Fire V60 servers (Intel architecture) at our data warehouse. Two of them are production servers. Yesterday we have added one more Sun Fire V60 server thus making a total of four. Now we are planning to set up backup and restore strategy. To be frank we do not have anything yet. The best solution would be the one which enables us live back up. We do not want to bring our productions servers to single user state but at the same to have the back up. Pl try to suggest me the best possible way. Even we are prepared for commercial software. Are there any companies who can handle these kind of things from their end? Is it safe to have these kind of arrangements? Is it advisable to have our own set up rather than depending on others? Thank you for your patience in advance. Rao

Rao , Before going to the backup solutions . Make sure the below norms are satisified on your machines for safer side. 1) Make sure the root disk is mirrored . You can do this using any volume manager ( solistice / veritas ) . 2) Make sure the root disk having /, /usr , /var and /opt is different from other data disk ( /export/home ) . Having root disk and data disk different will always save the data. If any disaster happens ( root disk getting corrupted ) , your data is still safe on the different disk . 3) You can also mirror data disk , keeping two copies on two different disks of the same data on the machine . Backup strategy : You havent mentioned the setup you do have to take the backup . In todays market two solutions are being effectively used . 1) Legato Backup ( vendor : EMC ) 2) Veritas Netbackup ( vendor : veritas ) Both are very expensive . If you can afford the above , using them will be a good idea . And both needs tape drives / storage disks . And there are many other backup solutions . If your boxes are connected to any storage devices , they do provide backup solutions over the network . Else you can also backup the data without using the above products . By scheduling using cronjobs and fire them on the tapes . Let me know what kind of resources you do have . Thanks , sunsolnav