What next after LTO ?

[Fr0dders]

I have a friend who runs a small business with his family. Their backups are now becoming so large that an LTO drive is not enough to backup their 3 servers.

What's the next step up. I work for an IT service provider that hosts over half the UK's medical records so our backup solution is a massive tape auto loader that takes up 5 racks !

I've spent the night searching and most Backup to disk devices or tape auto loaders are just massively expensive. When you need to backup more than 2.5 bt a night where do you go next ?

 

[Fr0dders]

First question is what on earth are they doing to be generating 2.5TB of changes per day. Secondly Tandberg make autoloaders that are a bargain.

If you want to move away from tape then look at DataDomain or one of the Dell AppAssure appliances.

You need more than just the changes on tape though. The whole data set gets backed up then you do an incremental backup to keep it up to date.

How would you restore your servers from tape if the tape only contained the incremental updates ? You'd need another tape with the first initial data set on and that's where we are falling over. The point here is we're backing up the entire server so it can easily be restored as a VM so just backing up exchange data is not what were after.

What we'd like is something that would enable us to restore any of the three servers quickly and easily and preferably something that would enable offsite replication for DR recovery.

The Dell app assure stuff loks like what we need, but I read one of the devices had a list price of £15,000 which is too much for our budget

 

[Fr0dders]

Without knowing too much about why you have so much data to backup, if I understood correctly, I would split the backups:

- Backup to disk using something like Veeam or vRanger (I have no experience with any of these, but some of them are highly rated). Because they do compression and de-duplication, you wouldn't need a huge array, so maybe something with 3 x 3TB SATA disks in RAID 5 for a total of 6 TB storage?

- Backup critical data to tape (i.e. specific directories on the VMs)

The backup to disk will give you quick recovery in case of some sort of disaster (you really have to define what these disasters are, as you may find that just backing up doesn't cover a lot of scenarios), and the data backup to tape will give you archival long-term storage and recovery of what's important; you can always rebuild a VM in an emergency -- it's the data that matters.

If you have hosted Exchange, consider going Office365 -- this will significantly cut down management and backup requirements.

This is kind of what I was thinking

Backup to disk somewhere for quick retrieval in the event of a data corruption / faults on one of your servers.

Then backup that disk backup to tape and put the tapes in a rotation meaning you can take a tape offsite everyday to provide you with a basic disaster recovery in the event of a fire.

My mistake, I read it as you were struggling to backup 2.5TB every night, not that you'd hit that limit on some of your jobs.

Do you have a budget in mind at all? A Tandberg LTO6 autoloader is £2700 plus VAT at retail, I'd expect to see a fair chunk off that just for asking.

Thats another option that I was looking at, but the Dell ones were silly money - starting from 5k. The tandberg sounds much more affordable.

 

[Fr0dders]

It'd also be handy to know what you're backing up: DB's, File shares, Mail?

For our fileshares we use vRanger to backup the OS, and commvault (Though any agent based backup software would do) to backup the data itself.
Full image backups are great for DR, not so granular when it comes to when the director has deleted a single file that they absolutely must have back right now.

There are lots of ways to do backups, and having everything as a VM gives you a lot more versatility in how you achieve it.

All of the above. so interesting question for you then.

If you were to start creating a backup solution from scratch, that enabled backup of both the data and the VMs for disaster recovery, what would you do ? What hardware are you backing up the vRanger / Commmvault backups on ?