Information Office Program
Michael J. Liszewski
Information Office Program Manager
Phone: 928.556.7458
E-mail: mjliszew@usgs.gov
System Backup and Disaster Recovery
Servers at the GCMRC are configured with Redundant Array of Independent (and inexpensive) Drives (RAID). GCMRC utilizes RAID 5 hot-swap disk arrays whenever possible. This allows the RAID 5 system to stay up and running before, during, and after a drive failure. RAID 5 systems store parity (redundancy) data across all hard drives equally and do not need to be powered down to change out a faulty disk drive. If a RAID 5 disk were to fail, the surviving drives have the information needed to reconstruct the data onto the replacement drive. In a RAID 5, three or more drives are used to create that configuration. The RAID 5 configuration provides excellent levels of redundancy and performance.
When RAID-5 is not possible we utilize disk mirroring. This allows for a redundant copy of the data and is utilized where 3 or more drives are not present.
Network backup is accomplished using an Overland NEO series tape library. This tape library has dual Linear Tape-Open -1 (LTO-1) drives in a 30 slot carriage, capacity of 3 terabytes non-compressed, with a maximum of 6 terabytes compressed without changing tapes. Daily backups start in the evening Monday thru Thursday, weekly and monthly backups start on Friday evening.