Data storage and archiving - what do you do?

[howartp]

Hi everyone.

 

I'm reasonably ok with my live data storage needs, but I'm fighting a losing battle with backup storage, and I know I'm not keeping long enough archives.

 

Server room (live storage) and DR location (disk and tape backup) are both on same site, but physically distant.

 

How do you do yours?

 

Our live storage is mainly on a SAN, with all the servers being VMware ESX. We use Veeam to backup to a 32TB disk array, which holds around 3 weeks of backups (weekly and daily), and I then back those up onto LTO6 tape.

 

I suspect my tape drive/autoloader is dying, I know I've no capacity for DR restore of data if the server goes up, and I only hold about 18 months of archive.

 

Do I get a big tape library (eg http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/products/tape-automation/product-detail.html?oid=5386662#!tab=features) which will sort my archive needs out for good, but won't help when it comes to DR because you can't run VMs from tape.

 

Do I get another SAN and/or bunches of disk trays, which will sort out data capacity for DR, but is still on the network and thus susceptible to virus attack.

 

Do I use Veeam's WAN facility to duplicate my backups to a local school over the county WAN, which still doesn't give me local storage for running VMs in DR unless I physically bring the server/storage back from the local school.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Peter

[howartp]

Anyone?

[psydii]

Wrestling with this one myself.

 

The need for long term recoverability pretty much requires tape given the sorts of volumes of data we are talking about. Any offsite disk based facility I've looked into is prohibitively expensive, and given Internet connections are between 100 and 1000MBit/s and the connection between the SAN and the Primary backup storage is 8Gb/s FibreChannel - tape looks like a good option.

 

(still the fastest way to get that volume of data across the country is to courier it)

 

You need to have tape for long term archive, and worst case DR e.g. total loss of the site, yes you could have your DR site elsewhere (Backups – Veeam Cloud Connect - System Professional) but can the school genuinely justify the expense - and with the Azure/ Office365 you could have a lot of services completely unaffected by the loss anyway.

 

Having a NAS from which you can do a live failover in the event your server rooms goes up in smoke is a 'nice to have' feature when looking at this through the lense of School IT Budgets.

 

In my case I may be able to re-provision some legacy servers and a DAS for a live-failover solution in the next 12-18 Months - but I'd need to replicate Core switch functionality at the DR location too which is again £££. So Tape it is.

[howartp]

Thanks - I'm working with @Millgate and @VeryPC to get some designs to formulate a tender from.

 

Tape library + SAN/Nas first, then I'll look at what £££ I've got left.

[PotNoodleTech]

You can save a large amount of money by using a 2012R2 server with dedupe enabled, filled with 4TB disks as you're veeam server. I call this a primary staging server, it's reasonably fast, local to the server room and because of dedupe would probably hold a years worth of backups.

 

Then use veaam copy job to replicate that data on a more permanent basis to a separate NAS other end of site, I use a Synology DS2413+ with 12 x 4TB disks in a Raid 6 array. You don't need to replicate every backup you ever take, just yesterdays, two weekly, two monthlys, two quarterlys and a yearly.

 

Preferably, replicate this onto a second NAS on a separate site e.g. another school. You can schedule the copy job for this to weekends only.

 

^^ that above is a pretty good compromise as the NAS devices are not expensive. Frankly there's no need for a SAN just for backups.

 

If you want to leverage quantity of backups able to be stored, instead of the NAS drives, use a Windows 2012 r2 server full of 4tb disks with dedupe enabled.

 

I see no real need for tape drives IMHO.