Wayne writes after Donna,

> > the real problem is the lack of gigabit connectivity...and that's why it
>  > on the most recent sib.  granted, it was a shot in the dark...but it
might
>  > have gotten hp's attention.       - d
>
>  A good point though!  Now about that issue of source code availability and
>  the future of MPE.... wouldn't gigabit connectivity be something nice to
add
>  in MPE 8.0 or 9.0?  With source code, all is possible.  Without source code
>  not much is possible (and yes I know the emulator approach will run at
>  whatever speed the base box runs at! - just want it natively!)

We haven't found a requirement for high-speed communications to be necessary
for our FTP'ed backups. Partial backups of only those files that were
modified during the day before, when done with MPE's store-to-disc and FTP'ed
from one HP3000 to another, have tended to be very, very quick -- at least in
our instance. We don't modify that many files in the course of one day. We've
been doing this now for several years. Every once and a while, to insure
perfect synchrony with the second HP3000, we either FTP everything over or
physically just take our backup tapes to the second machine and restore them,
more out of paranoia than anything else. We have never had the slightest
indication that the two machines ever get out of synch. The partial stores
seem to be doing the trick. The nice thing about this arrangement is that the
target HP3000 you're backing up to doesn't have to be very big, be very fast
or have a large user limit. At worst, it only needs to have a lot of disc
space.

We do essentially the same thing with our PC's on the same network, but using
completely different software. We purchased RhinoSoft's Serv-U FTP server for
one PC in order to allow it to act as a server. We also purchased their FTP
Voyager scheduler for all of the others. Every night beginning at 4AM, each
of the machines in staggered order FTP's their most recently modified files
to the server PC. At 4:30AM the process reverses, where each machine
downloads in turn all of the files that it either doesn't have or it finds
that were more recently modified than the copy that's resident on the PC, so
that by morning all six PC's will contain all of the same files. We don't
have to do a full-synchronization backup with the PC's as we do with the
HP3000. The manner by which FTP Voyager works, we can guarantee that the
machines are perfectly in synch with one another.

Although we have more PC's than just these six, these are the only machines
we backup in this manner; the rest we don't really care if we lose anything.
Nonetheless, we could easily back up a hundred machines during the night if
we wanted to. The processes go really quite quickly.

The MPE store-to-disc/MPE-to-MPE FTP solution cost us nothing to implement.
The RhinoSoft solution cost less that $200.

Wirt Atmar

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