Backup ideas for new build

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joblo37pam

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I'm working on spec'ing out a new build for one of my customers to upgrade their outgrown infrastructure and I'm kicking around a lot of ideas for backups. Specs aren't final yet, but there will be somewhere around 2TB of user accessible storage and 5 servers to back up (3 physical, 2 virtual)

I'd like to stay away from tapes for reliability/speed, but they will also need some way to keep a physical backup offsite. The customer doesn't want anything subscription-based, so online probably wouldn't be welcomed.

Right now I'm leaning toward a NAS iSCSI target and syncing that with an external hard drive or something for taking offsite, but I'm not familiar with any software that would make this simple for the end user. (Suggestions?).

What are you guys using for reliable SMB backups that don't break the bank but still perform well? Also, what software are you using with them?
 
Here's what I'm planning on implementing in a month or two to replace Backup Exec 12.5 and an HP Autoloader Tape drive.

I have basically 5 servers at our HQ. I'm ordering a new box to do Hyper-V on and virtualizing at least 3 of my current 5.

I am then going to put Data Protection Manager 2010 on two of the boxes. One will stay at HQ and do local disk to disk. The other will be going to one of our other locations to replicate the backup from the first DPM server. We do have a dedicated connection between the two sites though.
 
joblo37pam said:
I'd like to stay away from tapes for reliability/speed
Click to expand...

You are doing it wrong. Tape is still a very reliable backup media, and if you have the proper hardware and setup correctly will be very speedy. Now if you said you were staying away from tape because of price considerations and lack of familiarity with setting up such a system that would be a much better reason to stay away from tape.

That being said, I would suggest you take a look first as to how you are going to in fact do your offsite backup. There is software out there that you can setup your own offsite backup server for the offsite backup, or are you really going to rely on them taking care of either a tape or external hard drive which they will eventually forget to do.
 
Ok, so I don't want tape because of reliability, speed, cost, longevity, hassle, fragility, or the fact that Microsoft no longer supports it with server 2008. Aside from that, it's great...

This customer does not have an offsite office available for a replication server and does not want a subscription based service, so an online backup just isn't feasible. If they can't take some media offsite for disaster recovery, it's their loss, not mine.

Has anyone used something like this: http://www.tapesucks.com/HR3/includes/BNAS/BNAS-HRS201.php It seems like what I am looking for, but I may want bigger capacity drives.
 
joblo37pam said:
Ok, so I don't want tape because of reliability, speed, cost, longevity, hassle, fragility, or the fact that Microsoft no longer supports it with server 2008. Aside from that, it's great...
Click to expand...

I guess you mean NTBackup doesn't support it. Using software like Backup Exec works fine, of course it's not free and without hassle, but in my opinion, it's not a bad solution when you have some experience with tape backup hardware and software.
 
I'm with ya in ditching clunky old tape drives, I stopped using years ago for clients servers. When capacity allows, I've been using the removable hard drive media such as Dells PowerVault RD1000 drives...basically a little hot swap 2.5" SATA laptop drive in a cartridge. Drive itself is cheap, the removable media is not cheap, but they last about 10 years worth of mounts, and you don't need a cleaning cartridge. Fast and durable.

However, you have 2TB worth of stuff...I have a similar situation in one network, 5x servers, backing up to a PowerVault NF600 which is 4 TB capacity. Servers are backed up using Paragon Server Backup, so the nightly server backups are full images...each file is 1 gig in size, nightly server backups vary per server, but say a server is 40 gigs in size, it will be 40x 1 gig files.

Right now they do the offsite backup by manually copying files from the NF600 to a WD Passport USB drive a couple of times a week.

Upgrading their internet pipe to a 50/5 this September, plan on doing offsite synching of the NAS drive.
 
one problem you'll need to look at with using iSCSI NAS (essentially live storage), is that, well, the storage is live; ie: it can be deleted, overwritten, corrupted. Not a good thing for a backup solution. Ideally you want something that is redundant and either offline/online system, or a near-to-live system. This way you'll prevent the issue of a virus/user/hardware failure/fire/zombie attack wiping our your data and backups in one fell swoop.

Interrested in what others have to suggest as actual solutions (i'm a tape guy, using LTO1 -> 4 and several robot libraries, including an IBM TotalStorage 3494 library).
 
I've used the RD1000/RDX drives in quite a few SBS installs, and like them a lot. The capacity just isn't there.

The 2TB is actually the maximum size of the user files. Right now, they only have about 200GB of capacity (part of the reason for the new setup), so it will take a while to fill that capacity, but it needs to be backed up once it is used, whenever that is.

I do like the idea of the server images with paragon, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of them manually copying them to the external drive. I'd like to find a solution that automates that process. The product that I linked earlier appears to do that, but I haven't found a lot of reviews on it.
 
joblo37pam said:
I've used the RD1000/RDX drives in quite a few SBS installs, and like them a lot. The capacity just isn't there.
Click to expand...

Yeah...slowly getting there.....but not quite what our larger setups need yet. 320/640 and 500/1TB carts are out..but a tad pricey still.
 
Let's actually take in your requirements.

2TB worth of data to backup.

Let us assume you want to do a fairly simple rotation of weekly fulls and daily incremental backups. Then a copy of the full taken offsite. We are also going to assume that you have a decent GB network and that when the backups are being done you can average 100MB/s. That 2TB will take about 6 hours to backup.

So 4 full backups of 2tb and daily incremental of lets say 200GB, which is a 10% change per day, which is on the high end of things from my experience, but I do not know what kind of business this is to give you a better estimate. Let's also say you want 2 weeks worth of incrementals, so that is another 2tb worth of storage. So we need roughly 10TB worth of storage.

So build a machine with ~10TB worth of usable storage. Then get a piece of software like what my company sells: http://www.novastor.com/allproducts/novabackup_network.php or Backup Exec or the like. They all work about the same once configured right, it is the support and ease of use is what you really need to evaluate. You can even go open source if you want, http://amanda.zmanda.com/ I have heard good things, but have not personally tested them.
 
Take a look at CrashPlan. You can essentially build your own (or their own) server to house backups either locally or remotely, encrypted (both before being transmitted and the transmission itself), great compression (I average 30% across all systems, some go over 50%), it's low cost, platform agnostic (Mac, *Nix, and Windows) and easy to setup and maintain. You can set it to do backups in as little as 15min intervals, and if you want some high-redundancy you can setup a second server and duplicate your backups to that. the server itself is free, you just license it on a per-client basis. Google and Target both use them as part of their backup strategy.

I use it where I work as well as at my last job and it runs like a champ.
 
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