Dropping tape backup for remote site

EvilGrin · 28 Oct 2014 at 15:33

Hi guys, we're about to refresh our servers out in our Singapore office, and they've been terrible at changing tapes over the years, so I want to ditch their old LTO3 tape drive in favour of disk based backup.

We're very much a Dell house, but their NAS and DAS appliances look way over-costed for what I think we need, they're more expensive than the server we're going to be putting in even (R520)!

Any bright ideas for cost effective backup options? We're fully virtual on VMWare vSphere, so ideally I'd like to store a base copy of the vmdk for the main file server and DC there, as well as perform incremental backups on their files and folders which amount to 400-500gb.

Any ideas would be very welcome chaps!

Xez · 28 Oct 2014 at 17:36

What's the connection speed like?

A lot of our clients can't be bothered with tapes but still require the backed up media to be held off-site to meet certain requirements and policies. We use Veeam Backup & Replication for our virtual environment and I believe it has WAN acceleration too.

Is the backup purely for DR or will it be required to restore historic files?

An online backup may be a solution or if you have the storage capacity at your site providing the connection is decent and encrypted would it not be a possible for this?

ace-rimmer · 29 Oct 2014 at 10:54

keep tape keep me in the job

Bursar · 29 Oct 2014 at 11:54

Synology NAS?

We've got one in our Shanghai Office which I use as a Windows Backup target for a couple of machines. I then use their Cloud Station package to sync the data to another Synology box back in the UK.

Lanz · 30 Oct 2014 at 13:30

A standalone server, full of cheap disks (preferably RAID10) running Veeam. Size accordingly but be generous as Veeam can use a lot of storage for longer term retention if you don't have a dedupe device.

You have another Veeam proxy VM locally that sends your DC and file data over to that server using a copy job.

Caged · 30 Oct 2014 at 20:34

A Unitrends appliance

Xez · 30 Oct 2014 at 20:58

Lanz said:
A standalone server, full of cheap disks (preferably RAID10) running Veeam. Size accordingly but be generous as Veeam can use a lot of storage for longer term retention if you don't have a dedupe device.

You have another Veeam proxy VM locally that sends your DC and file data over to that server using a copy job.

Raid 10 is useless for low level storage it's just wasting disks.

Lanz · 30 Oct 2014 at 22:39

Xez said:
Raid 10 is useless for low level storage it's just wasting disks.

I would normally agree, but try doing reverse incremental with rollbacks on a 4TB vbk with Raid6, its slow and horrible and takes hours.

http://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backu...-performance-on-raid-5-vs-raid-10-t16269.html

When you're only needing a few TB like the op is needed, you might as well go RAID10, if you want 100TB, then of course it becomes expensive.

Xez · 31 Oct 2014 at 20:52

It entirely depends though if cost and space is an issue then a Raid 5 configuration will be more than adequate in most cases. One of our clients has a Raid 5 although 8x4TB disks and the performance is very impressive for 7200rpm disks. Almost twice as fast as 3x1.2TB 1000rpm disks in Raid 0.

If a single job in Veeam is at 4TB is causing an issue then split the job up?

Lanz · 1 Nov 2014 at 10:08

Could split it up, but unless you have a hardware dedupe device, then you lose the inline deduplication. Bit dodgy I reckon using 8 x 4TB in RAID5, risk of a double disk failure during the lengthy and IO intensive rebuilds.