New Backup Solution

[Bezwick]

Hi everyone, need some advice on a new backup solution for our two main servers. What we currently have is

1 File & print Server (Rack Mounted) with around 250 of data being backup up, but storage space for 1 TB. Currently being backed up by LTO2 Drive.

1 Media Server (Tower) with pretty much the same amount of data and backup drive.
Both have 1 GB NIC's, Both are Using Backupexec 10 and both store a lot of compressed files so the LTO2 drive can not longer backup the data on 1 tape.

I have been told i have around £4000 to spend on a better solution. Any thoughts on how best to proceed. NAS, LTO4 etc.

cheers

[ozzy]

We use two terastations on the other side of the site from the servers with a gig connection. or maybe set up you own box stuffed with hdds using free nas?

[Bezwick]

We use two terastations on the other side of the site from the servers with a gig connection. or maybe set up you own box stuffed with hdds using free nas?

We have an Iomega Storage box in a remote building that which takes a full backup from the server every two weeks. Unfortunately it takes 18 hours to run so we can only do one at a time, hence the fortnightly bakup as i get it to run on a saturday. So not sure that would work, as there is just too much data.

Thanks though

[EduTech]

We use a 4TB NAS Box to backup to, most of our main server have 10gbit Cards in them so backup prettttyy Quick! and the rest of just Gbit.

- NAS Would probably be your answer to back everything up to
- and if you have gbit`links then it should backup pretty quick i guess.

The NAS Box was pretty cheap, i can find out where i got that from, obviously if you dont already have 10gbit cards then i doubt you will be able to get them for your servers with that amount to spend anyhow.

James

[ozzy]

Just looked at the event Viewer for the job and ours takes just over 5 hours to do around 60 gb. Must admit I've never checked since I set it up
Maybe you should go for the good old external hdd, we used that for years but I got sick of taking them off site.

[tmcd35]

I've just asked Simon@CPL to quote me on Yosemite Backup Unlimited and two 4Tb NAS boxes. I like to keep 1 rackmount NAS is another building for day to day file backups and 1 portable NAS for Ghost Images and copies of Virtual Machines for DR backup. The portable NAS will be kept off-site during term time - probably at my house.

As for back-up routine. The off-site backs are taken once a term and each back-up is kept for a year. for the on-site backup's there is 1 full backup made at the start of the year, kept for 2 years, and everything else is either a differential or incremental backup based on that.

[gshaw]

Slightly jumping on the thread a bit but how would your backup plans change if you only had one building? Would you still put main backups in the same physical place if they can't be taken off site daily?

[Zimmer]

With £4000 to spend I would do it 'home brew' personally!

For your cash you could easily build two 2U rack boxes with enough RAID-5 storage to see you through the next two years (plus keeping some spares on the shelf).

With a £4000 budget considering the very small amount of data you are dealing with then you may as well do the most you can with it

[tmcd35]

Slightly jumping on the thread a bit but how would your backup plans change if you only had one building? Would you still put main backups in the same physical place if they can't be taken off site daily?

The DR backups being off-site is the important part IMHO. The main backups are there for quick file recovery when a pupil says

I've accidentally deleted my work!

If I only had one building I'd put the main back-up NAS as far away from the server room as my network/building layout will allow. If a fire takes one out hope the fireman stop the fire from spreading before it gets to the other.

If the whole building is taken out those backups are the least of your worries! And that's what the DR backups are for.

[Linfit]

We are a one site set up and we use a Netgear NAS box to do incremental back ups each day and a full back up once a week. It might be worth looking at upgrading your copy of Backup Exec with some of the money so that you can do encrypted back-ups, which would allow you to take them off site.

We have two removable drives which take a full backup every week, and we alternate them off site, they are small enough to take home in a bag.

We are backing up 460GB each weekend and rising by about 3GB a week, but the hardware didn't cost us much. We take the approach of having multiple backups on relatively cheap hardware in different places rather than a mega backup rack mounted solution; YMMV.

[gshaw]

The DR backups being off-site is the important part IMHO. The main backups are there for quick file recovery when a pupil says

What are you using for the DR backups and how regularly are they done?

[ranj]

I am in a similar position now, I need to revisit our backup and DR strategy and i would be grateful for any suggestion on how best to use our existing kit.

This is our current kit and this is the plan:

backup kit hardware

Overland SNAP Server with 9tb usable RAID 5 storage with SATA disks. Software included was Netvault Bakbone with 500gb VTL.
4tb 2u custom built Freenas box
2tb Windows 2003 server utilising a perl backup script.
Sony AIT2 50gb native tape drive...Very old

Currently the SNAP server is one of our main storage boxes, it serves out a variety of data such as various shared drives (e.g. staff, admin shared areas), iScsi target for home directories and profiles, use Microsoft iSCSI initator to do this and it also is a backup target for our apple XRAID data.

The FreeNas is a secondary backup location for our apple data and we also use it for archival storage.

The 2tb windows server is where all our Microsoft servers daily and weekly backups are stored. Its a combination of a perl script and XXcopy which runs on a daily/weekly basis which takes a copy of the data and dumps it to this server and it sorts in a nice format with dates and will delete the oldest copy automatically, will do 1 weeks worth mon-thu of critical data and then on weekend will do a whole backup of all shares on all our various windows servers and store it in a weekly folder. When we restore we simply open the server as a network drive, locate the file in a nice folder structure and drag and drop back to the live data.

The 50gb tape drive is installed on our MIS server, as well as doing a copy of the server onto the windows backup server, we also backup the data onto tape using Veritas backup exec Ver 9. Is slow, but seems to be reliable and has good reporting features.

problems with this setup and possible solutions

We currently do whole daily backups of data, and my knowledge of perl is limited. This is full backups and the backup windows are slowly increasing, it can take approx 5 hours to do a daily backup. Currently do this in the evening but can impact on performance for our VPN users and my worry is it will impact once our VLE is in (Frogteacher).

A weekend backup with all the data takes approx 18 hours.

Once our SAN arrives the snap server will become the a NAS box with all the backups, hope is to keep up to 4 weeks worth of data. I was thinking of Rsync to backup data as it will work similar to our perl script, Can this do incremental backups and erase older copies of backups? Is it known to be reliable or have other schools suffered problems? Would I best use the software designed for the SNAP server (bakbone netvault virtual tape library software) is very expensive to purchase APPROX 7K!!! if i want a 6tb VTL as well as plugins for exchange and SQL. I have looked at an alternative such as SEP Sesam which is approx 4k and seems to do more or less the same job. Does anyone recommend this?

The freenas box will continue to be used for a secondary backup of the MAC data and archival storage and the windows backup server is going to be located in a remote location and my plan is a weekly backup will be done onto the snap server and then NAS will send a secondary copy over to the windows server at a remote location. What do fellow edugeekers think of this, would there be a better way?

A lot of of our servers are being moved to VMware so need a backup solution to backup our virtual servers, can anyone recommend how I would do this? would it be best to use something like VCB?

Solutions I am currently thinking of is Rysnc, Bakbone Netvault, Sep Sesam, Retrospect?

Which schools use any of these solutions, any recommendation, is there any other software you would recommend, budget on backup is approx 5k.

Thanks

[dan400007]

If you want a cheap NAS backup then have a look at this Thecus unit: Thecus N8800 - Ultra-high Performance 2U NAS server | Overview

I've just brought one but haven't had chance to power it up yet.

10.5Tb of storage (in RAID 5) for a little over £2,000 and it includes redundant power supplies.

[bossman]

@Bezwick:

I would think as the rest do along the lines of NAS box but would also look at upgrading your LT02 to LT04 for encrypted data tapes which can be taken off site.
A proper D2D2tape which will meet DRP criteria.