Backup Hardware

[techie08]

Hi Everyone

 

Im after some advice on what backup devices to use.

 

At present im backing up 1.2tb of studnets home dirs to tape (LTO3 HP Autoloader) which is spread over 4 tapes every friday. Daily backups are incremental.

Yesterday i built an older HP server that has 1.5tb of storage and installed an eval of DPM 2010 and got this to back up the student data. DPM has now used all of this space so it means that i would have to go and purchase a server with about 4 times as much disk space!!!

 

My question is that would i be better off upgrading my Autoloader to LTO4/5 if i have to upgrade hardware?

 

The time it takes DPM to do the initial copy is so far taking 2 days where as the auto loader is backing up in 18 hours on a friday for the student data and the amount of student data is sure to increase and i also have to backup other servers and VMs as well!!

 

I need something that is both cost effective and fairly quick at backing up.

 

Thanks Everyone

[dhicks]

DPM has now used all of this space so it means that i would have to go and purchase a server with about 4 times as much disk space!!!

 

3TB harddrives are now available, around £200 I think, so a 6TB RAID-5 server would cost you around £800. That might compare okay with your other options.

 

--

David Hicks

[SYNACK]

Depends on your eventual plans and requirements. DPM is a different beast from just the LTO and has the facility for two stage backup, initially it will back up the whole lot onto a data partition on disks then it will back up block level changes so that you can restore to multiple points in time while only using a small increase in the amount of backup storage space required. The second stage to this would be an off site moveable form of backup like a tape drive that DPM can back up on to.

 

The speed issues with DPM could be because of hardware issues (slow disks or network cards) or could be to do with the initial setup. I think that any additional backups would probably take less time as it will only need to mirror the changed portions from primary storage.

 

From a cost point of view DPM is probably still cheaper given the extreme pricing of LTO hardware but you may need another solution to offsite the backups with.