Backup / replication between sites

[DavePa]

Greetings, we have 3 sites (post 16) that are connected by fibre links. All 3 sites are linked to form a WAN and I can see any site from any other. I need to provide both a backup and file replication solution and am looking for a hardware-based solution to keep the costs down so although the likes of Redstor are very appealing the cost (£12k per year for the volume of data we have) is a problem. I would prefer to purchase a couple of NAS/SAN devices and perform my own 'offsite' backup - the sites are in geographically different locations so a major disaster at one would not affect the others. My idea is to place a device at our main site and backup the virtual servers from all sites to that (maybe make a file copy of key network shares as well) before replicating it to a 2nd device that is at a different site. I need the data at each site to be de-duplicated and compressed before being sent over the WAN links and I need to find a company that offers software that can do this without charging an ongoing management fee. I am looking to purchase the hardware and software myself and manage the backups in-house. All of the companies I have spoken to only offer this is a service where even using our own hardware there is a recurring (not insignificant) monthly cost which is what I am trying to avoid.

 

Has anybody any experience of software that will do what I want without being licensed on a monthly basis - Arcserve? Backup Exec? I did enquire about Veeam but as their pricing is per virtual server it was too expensive (over £20k for licenses alone)

 

Thanks in advance

[DavePa]

...answered this one myself (I hope)

 

One of the companies I spoke to offers a 'hybrid' service whereby we provide the hosting and hardware and they provide the licensing, monitoring and management. This brings the annual costs down to a more reasonable level and although obviously not as cheap as doing everything in house it looks to be a good compromise in terms of cost / efficiency

[kmount]

Veeam is only per VM if you license it under the cloud model.

 

Veeam typically (like VMware) is licensed per physical CPU you're backing up.

 

Good news re your hybrid solution, do let us know how it goes

[cpjitservices]

@DavePa - Had a similar setup with a local large college

 

At the main site it was NetApp SAN and DotHills at remote locations, either connected via fiber to local sites or tails from ISP to sites outside of the city. We Deduped everything! I believe it was all done through the NetApp and Dothill software that was provided with the sans, we had Virtual Hosts so they were all replicated around the sites using vMotion, we backed up data etc using DeltaCopy (DeltaCopy - Rsync for Windows) that was the easiest solution for replication/backing up of data.

 

We had a total of 40 Terabytes of storage for the college's data.

[pbainbridge]

I have 50+ primary schools to backup to a central SAN over a WAN and used to use BackupExec. Version 2012 was a nightmare and 2014 worse. I eventually got so sick I tried BackupAssist. It's now on all our sites. It's simple, easy to configure and use and very good value for money. The software is free and a license for that and the Rsync module (you need it) is £260 for 2 years.

 

We've also paid for the central management console but with only 3 sites I suspect you wouldn't need it.

[DavePa]

I have 50+ primary schools to backup to a central SAN over a WAN

 

Crikey! That's one heck of a lot of sites to backup! I'll have to have a look at that next time around but have very limited experience of backup software - I've used BackupExec and Arcserve many years ago but nothing recently. Microsoft DPM is an option but again, I have never used it. I suspect that once you know the principles and the software it becomes a lot easier to manage yourself but starting from scratch it would take some time to get up to speed

[pbainbridge]

Having used a myriad of s backup solutions over the years I have to say this is the simplest. If you have your data storage area sorted you can go from software installation and config to backup in 10 minutes. You can download it and use it for 30 days free before you need to license it, that's what we did

[Bruce123]

Just following on from the other sage suggestions/advice, you could also look at Microsoft Data Protection Manager.

 

If the WAN links are fast enough, you could backup all you're data/servers at one site to another site over WAN (D2D off-site).

 

DPM will backup MS-based workloads such as VMs (hosted by Hyper-V), SQL, Exchange, Shares. Backup is usually D2D (Disk to Disk). But D2D2T (Disk to Disk to Tape) or D2D2C (Disk to Disk to Cloud) can be configured. You just need one server and some storage (such local or as an iSCSI NAS).

 

Licensing is cheap for Education. No native de-dup, but the incremental backups (think of off-site shadow copy) are very efficient and low bandwidth requirements.

 

It's not difficult to setup yourself. The D2D2C is an interesting option as it natively supports Azure as the "cloud".

 

All sorts of backup frequencies and policies can be applied to meet your DR requirements, such as backing up the a VM each night, but also backup the application/data within the VM periodically during the day.

 

You could backup all servers to your NAS with a retention of say 14 or 28 days, then backup once every 2 weeks to the Cloud.

 

Good luck with whatever you decide.

 

Bruce.

[DMcCoy]

DPM was written to make BE2012 look good... So far 2 of 3 have hosed their databases making them unconfigurable and needing a complete rebuild.

[PotNoodleTech]

Veeam definitely. Not sure what licencing you looked at but for me it's licenced per physical socket which is cheap as chips on the essentials version. May be more expensive if you've got lots of hosts dotted around.

 

It's so easy to tell veeam where to send your data, you want it here in this server room, or over there on that NAS, or both? What about a cheap nas in every school, a main backup server in your main school, and the backups replicated to all schools? Easy few clicks of the mouse with Veeam.

 

Look at the licensing again, no other software comes close (it's a bit like VMware was 6-7 years ago)

Edited February 18, 2015 by PotNoodleTech