Off Site Backups - tape or HDD?

Sorry for slow reply - no net at home and has been a busy morning!

Looking at tape libraries now, will have to do a somewhat persuasive report to justify the cost, but I guess asking the question "what's the data worth to the company?" will go a long way to winning them over (thanks Mr Plow :p). We're an IT development company with quite a bit of customer data on site, so if that's lost we're a little screwed!

The library I've been quoted for is Quantum - are these any good? Or should I be looking at something from one of the bigger providers e.g. Dell, HP, IBM etc?

There's already a company that provides secure storage who visit the business park we're on, so that side of it is covered :) (ACS based in Birmingham if anyone knows them?)
 
Haggisman said:
Sorry for slow reply - no net at home and has been a busy morning!

Looking at tape libraries now, will have to do a somewhat persuasive report to justify the cost, but I guess asking the question "what's the data worth to the company?" will go a long way to winning them over (thanks Mr Plow :p). We're an IT development company with quite a bit of customer data on site, so if that's lost we're a little screwed!

The library I've been quoted for is Quantum - are these any good? Or should I be looking at something from one of the bigger providers e.g. Dell, HP, IBM etc?
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Does your business insurance policy have any specific requirements for having off-site backups?

From memory, the only companies which actually make LTO hardware are HP, Quantum, IBM and Tandberg.
 
Westyfield2 said:
Years ago on one of the projects he ran my Dad had a load of servers that were being configured for the customer and they were put at the far end of an open-plan floor away from everyone (because of the noise) for configuring. The aircon units above them decided to dump all their coolant in the servers, but they only noticed because of the remote monitoring screens all lighting up red. Amazingly, thanks to having redundant everything in them, the servers kept running!
Click to expand...

we had something similar recently, the aircon made the server room into a water feature pretty quickly. luckily it was at the edge of the room and not above the racking.

as for fire and the guy saying about the vacuum system so thatll be alright.. what if the fire is elsewhere in the building and reduces the building to a smoldering pile of rubble?

i hope youre not in charge of your works DR.. :rolleyes:

to answer the OP, tape. as mentioned far more robust but more cumbersome maybe. just get an external company to take offsite, if i remember rightly an employee taking the tapes home is a nono (sensitive data in the hands of an employee and all that).
 
#Chri5# said:
Does your business insurance policy have any specific requirements for having off-site backups?

From memory, the only companies which actually make LTO hardware are HP, Quantum, IBM and Tandberg.
Click to expand...

Having spoken to the FD - no, our insurance doesn't stipulate any particular requirements.

I've now specced up a couple of Quantum units, both an LTO4 and LTO5. Both 8 slot units, there's about an £800 price difference when interface cards and tapes are included (the LTO5 being more expensive).

However the LTO 5 has the advantage of being ~1.5hrs quicker (at the quoted speed, obviously in real use this will be slower) and needing only 4 tapes (2 compressed) to do the full backup, as opposed to 7 (4 compressed) on the LTO4. I'm leaning towards the LTO5, as it's obviously going to be more future-proof, and leave room for expansion, any ideas/feedback?
 
We use Disk-NAS-Disk at work. Disk and NAS stay on site, in different rooms and weeklies/monthlies go offsite.

I've heard horror stories about tapes that makes me steer clear. Things like the OS not supporting the drive when archive migration comes about, the drive heads migrating over time, which is great whilst the drives continue to work, but if your drive dies and new drive doesn't pick up the tape data because it's misaligned by the old drive.

However, we get away with 1TB 2.5" drives as we aren't backing up a large amount of data with us being a small company. I could see 4TB being a pain, but I'd just automatically split it so that it would write to smaller disks. You're going to have to do that anyway with tapes anyway.
 
We wouldn't even consider sending disks offsite, but that is in large multi-customer enterprise environments. Tapes are just that much more robust for transportation.

Most back environments I have supported are either normal Disk -> Tape or Disk -> Disk -> Tape with the tape elements going offsite. Although in one particular case we had a requirement for Disk -> Disk -> Tape -> Tape with the second level of tapes going offsite (although this was using Tivoli Storage Manager so was easy to set and manage but cost quite a bit).

I think I've only had one problem with tape drives like two00lbwaster mentions in the last 15 years (and that was in the days of 5GB 8mm tapes) and things like that are why you should test your backups regularly (using a different drive for the restore) to pick up any issues before the bite you in the ****.
 
I'm amazed at the amount of times I perform a site survey to find that clients store tapes in insufficiently rated fireproof safes thinking they'll withstand a fire. Unless they're specifically Fireproof Media cabinets, you're tapes will melt and become fairly useless.

Yes it's fireproof, but it isn't heat proof!
 
For me it's tapes stored off site with rotation schemes. Nothing wrong with backing up to disk, but depending on how recent you need to data I'd be doing at least a weekly off site backup.

I've has experience with a leak into a server room almost taking out 24 racks of stuff. Fortunately they had daily full backups stored off site on tapes and so nothing much was lost - worst case it was about 2 hours of changes.

IMO ideally it is Data --> Disk --> Tape

- GP
 
I'd also check with your auditors, ISO or otherwise to see what their recommendations would be for a backup solution. Maybe they can advise what their preference would be for your type of company...
 
Any reason why you have gone for an LTO4 device rather than 5? The super loader you have chosen now supports LTO 5. If you can wait, not sure how long but LTO 6 is out quite soon I believe so that is 8TB of compressed data.

We have a backup to disk setup then a duplicate job to tape on an LTO 5 drive. I really wouldn't like using a removable HDD.
 
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is dedupe software not an option to run offsite backups?

think out total data is 10tb but with vmware change block tracking we are looking at a total of about 1.8tb. The increase in size each day is minimal and if the **** hits the fan we get a courier to pick the HDD from the offsite provider and bring it us.
 
the quantum superloader 3 is one of the worst library's around in my experience, but if i had to buy one i would make sure it had a HP drive in it, or buy dell and you should get an ibm drive
 
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