Backup options

PR. · 9 Mar 2010 at 10:04

Looking for a bit of advice...

We are currently about to upgrade all our servers with Windows 2008 R2 and replace the hardware however we can't decide what's the best process for backing them all up.

We have 10 sites each with at least one server which runs as a DC, Exchange, File/Print, and soon SharePoint Services. In total we have about 2TB of file data and about 500Gb of Exchange stores across all the sites (increasing fast).

Currently each site is backed up via BackupExec to a tape on the local server, this relies on a user in each office swapping the tape which they often forget. It also costs a fortune to buy 21 tapes (Mon-Thur, Friday x5, Jan-Dec) for each of the 10 sites. On top of that we have no maintenance on our current BackupExec licenses so we will need to purchase 10 new/upgrade licenses (plus Exchange/File/SQL agents) for Windows 2008 compatibility.

We'd like to be able to back up all the sites to a single file server at our HO and then either back that up to a tape or perhaps to another remote site, for resiliency. However even with our upgraded connections it won't be possible to be transferring 600Gb of OS/File/Emails from each site every night, not to mention restoring servers remotely if a server failed.

I was wondering if anyone had encountered a similar setup and how they resolved it...

Thanks

iaind · 9 Mar 2010 at 10:12

Have you thought about some sort of replication?

BackupExec 2010 does block level incremental backups - you could do an incremental every 15 minutes to a central server, then back that up to tape

PR. · 10 Mar 2010 at 00:52

I did think of replication but thought that the SQL database and Exchange mail store would be constantly defragging and being re-arranged resulting in the block level backup mass duplicating the files?

Spammeh · 10 Mar 2010 at 12:22

We use something called doubletake. It can replicate data across sites. So you can transfer the full backup first and then after that it will only transfer the changes meaning that the amount of data transferred overnight will be a lot less.

Good for a dr point of view imho

walnuts · 10 Mar 2010 at 12:58

I've only seen enterprise backup apps that can do what your looking for. We were quoted £14K for Commvault software to backups 10 servers over 6 offices with Cammvault software running on single server at our head office.

If I was in your position I would look at Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010. It's priced similar to Backup Exec and from I've been told it should be able to backup remote windows servers.

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/dataprotectionmanager/en/us/2010beta-overview.aspx

PR. · 12 Mar 2010 at 16:39

Hmm, must admit I'd not heard of MS Data Protection Manager 2010 before, might be worth a trial to see how it performs.

Thanks for that.

oddjob62 · 12 Mar 2010 at 16:49

walnuts said:
If I was in your position I would look at Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010. It's priced similar to Backup Exec and from I've been told it should be able to backup remote windows servers.

I've been using DPM 2007 for 18months now. Hoping to get the nod to upgrade to 2010 in the next few weeks. Yes it can backup from remote sites, and uses VSS to sync only the bit level changes. The downside is that the tape side of things is VERY basic compared to other backup systems, and when jobs fail they don't have any auto-healing/retry function.

Note: Like i said I've not tried 2010 yet and i know for a fact that some of these things (the auto-retry for example) have been improved/fixed.

Diakatarnis · 12 Mar 2010 at 17:12

what about backup exec system recovery, doesnt that do the bit level after the first initial backup? or Shadow Protect is another one that does the same off my head :S

walnuts · 12 Mar 2010 at 18:31

oddjob62 said:
I've been using DPM 2007 for 18months now. Hoping to get the nod to upgrade to 2010 in the next few weeks. Yes it can backup from remote sites, and uses VSS to sync only the bit level changes. The downside is that the tape side of things is VERY basic compared to other backup systems, and when jobs fail they don't have any auto-healing/retry function.

Note: Like i said I've not tried 2010 yet and i know for a fact that some of these things (the auto-retry for example) have been improved/fixed.

DPM not perfect but like you said they've fixed some of major flaws in 2010. Main one I've read about is ability to auto grow volumes. I've been told previously if you assigned to much disk space to job you were stuck with it.

I'm still stuck using Backup Exec 12.5 as I still have a number of legacy Windows 2000 machines to backup and DPM doesn't support Windows 2000.

oddjob62 · 13 Mar 2010 at 11:23

walnuts said:
Main one I've read about is ability to auto grow volumes.

Could easily be done in powershell. The new Autogrow feature isnt' as flexible afaik (25% growth fixed). In fact that's one of my pet peeves about DPM is the lack of flexability. Simple things that could be variables are just fixed (eg the free tape threshold level)
Also there are warnings/errors that come up that you can't set to always ignore (eg the 9am tape inventory will fail if the tape is in the tape drive and not in the slot it was in before)
Lastly the fact that you couldn't label a tape. Each time a tape was used it was given a new label within DPM. This is ok if you use barcodes, but very annoying if you don't.