Corporate backup is big and complicated.

October 2, 2009 11:58 AM

I'm going to upgrade the corporate backup environment where I work in 2010, and I need help sorting through all of the backup hardware/software providers. I've had DataDomain, FalconStor, ExaGrid, and a bunch of other companies give presentations about their backup solutions, but they are all running together in my head. Does anyone have hands on experience or suggestions about which company to go with (your suggestion doesn't have to be one of the companies listed above)? Price is important, but I know this is going to be expensive. Details about the environment and the desired feature set inside.

I would like the following things in the new backup environment:

• Disk to Disk Backup
• Deduplication
• Site to Site Data Replication (probably replicate the small sites backups to two main sites then replicate the two main sites between each other.)
• Easy Addition of More Storage
• Easy to add Another Site
• NO TAPES

Detailed information about our current environment:

We have a total of 6 sites spread across the USA. Three small sites each have a file server, a domain controller, a backup server, and and a tape library. The remaining three sites each have 20-80 servers. There are a mix of SQL servers, Exchange email servers, websites, domain controllers, etc. We use Symantec Backup Exec, and all of the tape hardware is LTO-3. All of the sites have VPN tunnels connecting back to the main sites. The three small sites have business cable internet, the two biggest sites have symmetric 10 megabit internet, and the third biggest site has 2x T1s.

Please no suggestions to use open source software/hardware unless I can get a support SLA of ~4 hours.

posted by gregr to computers & internet (5 comments total)

How about virtualized backup? More of a DR solution than backup per se, Platespin Forge from Novell. disclaimer: i used to work there. but it is a cool product.
posted by GuyZero at 12:07 PM on October 2

GuyZero, Just watched the demo video for Platespin Forge. Looks very cool, but like you said its not exactly a backup system.
posted by gregr at 12:52 PM on October 2

Hey, check out GlusterFS. They offer 4 hour SLA, 24/7 at $8,500 a year. The site looks like it got a big makeover too, it used to have an opensource project feel. I reached out to them about a year ago and decided I didn't need the support contract.

The idea is you install it on top of the file system and then re-export nfs or smb ontop of that. It is really, really fast too. Play around with it in Vmware if you want, it is kind of need to bring down a node and watch it rebuild. You don't even need a fancy backend if you invest in the highest gig copper switches you can find. It all runs on commodity hardware.

I don't know if I'd run applications themselves on gluster (though speed tests show this is possible don't know how it handles bottlenecks and such). Instead I would write a script that used ntbackup to do so. I don't know what your requirements are for high availability, in my mind backups are for fires and total loss of hardware situations. Since you have two sites you could probably fairly easily run with almost no shared architecture, but I don't know exactly what you're running.
posted by geoff. at 1:29 PM on October 2

If you are familiar with Backup Exec, why not move to Netbackup if you want more enterprise features? Although NBU is certainly not cheap.

I don't like IBM Tivoili/TSM at all, for several reasons. You can send me mefi mail if you want to here more about that.
posted by Silvertree at 2:00 PM on October 2

2 of the 3 online backup service vendors pages you linked to were for VMware solutions, but you don't explicitly state that you are running a virtualized production environment. You do seem to indicate that you are running a number of Microsoft based server products (Exchange, SQL Server, domain controllers, etc.) which leads me to remind you that some of these Microsoft products have specific backup APIs which a backup software product must use in a live production environment, to maintain integrity of the backup, and the live production environment, and to facilitate restores. Back Up Exec, in particular, has a number of application specific modules that do this, explicitly.

If your production environment allows you to bring down virtual servers for duplication/restoration of the server, that's a bit simpler way of going about things, but in many production environments, Exchange servers and SQL servers in particular, are 24x7 operation. It would pay you to analyze this, if you haven't already, before pursuing specific backup solutions.

One other thing I don't think anyone has mentioned, that is important to a backup strategy, is backup depth. A good tape rotation system (grandfather-father-son, Tower of Hanoi, or similar) can give you a full month of backup depth on minimal media sets, which is vital if it takes you a week or so to discover that you've been infected with some low level trojan. You can, of course, replicate this with an online or disk solution, but the cost of storage to do so is something you must plan for from the outset, and that your backup solution must be able to maintain, automatically, as you go forward.
posted by paulsc at 8:59 PM on October 2