1

I’m about to get into a topic that is very aggrivating in my department, especially to my boss. Backups are a touchy subject, mainly because they tend to be very unreliable right now. I am aiming to change this. Let me give you a bit of background.

I work for a fairly small insurance company, and have been here for just under a year. The company is home to less than 100 employees and the IT department is comprised of only 8 of us, myself and one other being the networking/tech support guys. We have about 19-20 servers that we run full backups on every night, many of which house no more than 250gb of data. We have 4 tape drives (1 LTO5, 1 LTO4, 2 LTO3) and 3 Backup Exec “media servers” (not my idea…). Unfortunately, with data growing by the day, our time windows are getting smaller and smaller, and tape is starting to become very unreliable, to the point where they either randomly eject or have general annoying problems that we can’t always catch at the right time. I really need to move to something faster and more reliable in order to get us in the green again.

Due to the whole “oldschool” factor, I know I’ll never get my company to support off-site “cloud” backups, so that is out of the question. I am looking into a rack-mountable NAS server that I can back my servers up to at night using Backup Exec, and then from the NAS server to tape (directly connected, not over the network) during the day either through BE as well, or through the device’s native OS, whatever that may be. I am very new to NAS and honestly don’t know much about it.

It seems like many of these servers run their own OS, while others run Windows Storage Server. Is there a preferred OS to choose? We use CDW as our partner. Any recommendations? We would need probably around 7-10TB of storage in a Raid 5, with a budget of no more than $10,000 if possible.

If you guys could help educate me and make some recommendations, I would greatly appreciate it! Sorry if this post is a little unorganized as there is a lot going through my mind right now but my main goal is to fix these backups!

Thanks and have a great day!

9 Spice ups
2

We do our backups the same way you just described. Disk to Disk to tape. We purchased (several years ago) an HP Nas with Windows Storage Server 2003. Runs like a champ!

3

We’re in the same boat… About the same size organization. There’s only two of us, so it’s a pain to get up in the middle of the day and switch tapes. 1TB used to look like alot of data. Now it seems small. So we’re seriously looking at disk-based backup. Curious to see what the SW community recommends. We’d like something with hot-swap drive cartridges that’s analogous to a tape drive. Wish SSD’s were larger/cheaper

4

Honestly, you seem to have a good grip on things. We still mostly use tape backups at our shop. Your solution would simply be working with CDW to build a server within your price range. Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 is what you should pick up.

The main thing to consider here is data transfer speed. Is your network set up with the appropriate network switches?.. you need to make sure that if you’re doing this all over ethernet, you’ll still have enough time in your window for all data to transfer. You’ll also want to plan for the data growth you mentioned.

As long as that all checks out, I say go for the RAID 5!

5

Thanks for the help so far everyone! Forgot to mention that we are running on a full gigabit network, with gigabit Cisco switches. I have read a lot about using fiber, but I think that’s a little too much for an organization of this size.

Looking forward to any other recommendations you guys can give me.

Thanks!

6

CFonseca wrote:

I have read a lot about using fiber, but I think that’s a little too much for an organization of this size.

FWIW: Fiber is only of value at network distances > 100m, electrically noisy environments having large RFI or EMF sources, or during a lightning strike.

7

Oh, My, God! RAID 5? I do hope your kidding :slight_smile:

We’re rolling out the same system here, and oddly enough for the same reasons. We’re putting in a second storage server in one of our remote offices as well to insure DR data availability, and we’re also rolling out the aforementioned Backup Exec software with a D2D2T system. Our full backups take over 36 hours to run (thank goodness for weekends) so any work I want to do to the servers on the weekends happens bright and early on Mondays. I agree that working with your vendor of choice should get you a decent solution, but be sure to run anything they try to sell you through a “BS filter” just to keep them honest. We’ve had very good luck with CDW as well, but we also have some other vendors we do occasional business with just so we have a counterpoint to their view and can see what else others come up with. When you’re ready, you should try the RFQ process from within Spiceworks - works like a charm!

8

Scott, what would be the issue with Raid 5 in this situation? Not enough parity? Performance issues? I have not had much experience with other forms of Raid so I’m not really sure if a different level of Raid would better suit this situation.

George, thanks for the information on Fiber. I never knew that! We have a fairly small data center and everything is in one building so ethernet is definitely the way to go IMO.

9

I’d have a look at the QNAP or snap-server NAS boxes which can do iSCSI and used them as a SAN rather than NAS (and for high writes RAID10!)

May a good point to look at the data items, it’s value, how often it needs to be backuped how quickly it needs to be restored, how long it needs to be retianed (from a legal and business pov). Also think about DR as well - if you’re 2 miles from the end of a runway, what happens if a plane lands on the building (used to work 1/2 mile away and one day a Harrier did a fly-pass, stuffed it and dumped in a field opposite end of runway! if it had been travelling the other way…)

Once you have this and some growth predictions you can start to built backup/restore and built it into your DR and BC plans

10

Martin, from a legal perspective, it is extremely important that we do not lose customer data! Granted not everything we back up is customer-related or changes day-by-day, but due to the “oldschool factor” of the company I don’t see full backups going anywhere any time soon (unfortunately). I have been trying to push for incrimental or differential backups for our web servers and domain controllers, but the management here always prefers a full backup just in case.

We do perform a yearly DR test at a Sunguard facility in Philadalphia and have been successful every year thus far. Right now we keep a rotation of 10 tapes, and run full tape backups Monday-Friday. One tape is sent to Iron Mountain each week for safe keeping, and the rest are kept elsewhere off-site. We do not keep any backups in-house which makes restoring files a pain, which would be another huge plus for disk!

I’m not sure if we would still be able to perform full backups every night to disk without overwriting the previous night’s backups. I guess this is okay if the disk backup is moved to tape but would the solution to that just be more disk? Compression?

11

I am only running 4 windows servers, but have been using Backup Exec going directly to an external SATA drive in a USB caddy. This works OK, but I am also currently evaluating NAS. NetGear ReadyNAS in particular.

My plan is to get a ReadyNAS box to use for the backup, then let the ReadyNAS software sync this with an offsite ReadyNAS box at a nearby, VPN-connected location. I can then copy to the external SATA drive in a USB caddy.

If you can’t tell, I am rather done with tape.

12

you can run disk->disk->tape which will give you a larger window to drop the files to tape as you’re effectively caching on the large SAN/NAS first, so the backups ‘finish’ and you then spool out to tape. I’d also look at some of the tape robots as well so you can multiplex the tape writes.

Maybe get a days consultancy in from a BUE specialist, or Symmantec themselves, to look at options of what you can do with BUE 2010R3 to help out.

13

We have about half the users you do and only three servers. I put in a Buffalo TeraStation several months ago to handle all our Backup Exec storage. I have been really pleased with the speed and ease of use of the device. Cost was a real concern for us and I found it for a good price online at TigetDirect.

14

CFonseca wrote:

Scott, what would be the issue with Raid 5 in this situation? Not enough parity? Performance issues? I have not had much experience with other forms of Raid so I’m not really sure if a different level of Raid would better suit this situation.

George, thanks for the information on Fiber. I never knew that! We have a fairly small data center and everything is in one building so ethernet is definitely the way to go IMO.

There seems to be a lot of debate around RAID 5 vs RAID 10 (and vs others). I spent a while researching different RAID configurations when building a new file server last year. I concluded that RAID 10 made the most sense for our file server.

There is a pretty good write-up here:

http://miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt

I thought I had another good one but can’t find it in my bookmarks.

WIkipedia has a quick summary:

15

Tried to look into the SAM-SD option floating around here?
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/103699-sam-sd-info might be a helpfull link for you on that part.
Aside from that I can say that we have here quiet good experiences with the ReadyNAS4200 as a storage device.

16

The problem with backup exec is that it doesn’t back up resources in parallel, so performance of it is quite horrible when backing up many resources on a network when time windows are small compared to the amount of data. I use BUE all over the place and this is one of the most frustrating things for me compared to Arkeia network backup which does multi-flow beautifully. Unfortunately for most shops, Arkeia is a linux server only backup solution unless you go with their appliance. I assume you aren’t interested in switching from BUE, so you’re going to have to deal with its massive bottleneck issues of backing up one thing at a time.

The other point I would say, is move natively all your server data to a SAN/NAS/server that has a tape autoloader and BUE connected physically to it. Cut out this middleman of D-D-T, and store your data natively closer to the tape backup device on your network. Eliminate one of the D’s and try not to complicate your backup environment any more than it already is. Don’t forget that LTO5 with compression is probably faster than what gig ethernet will typically send data to BUE, so backing up over a network to LTO5 with entry level software like BUE wastes the performance of that drive to a high degree.

17

You would also save a ton of network/server resources by simply changing to incremental (of diff) Mon-Thurs and full on Friday. Although HP is top notch, Supermicro makes some nice servers that hold a ton of storage - FYI which would be more than enough for a backup server. Take a look at their 3U and 4U chassis.

18

About 2 years ago I made the swith to disk backup using a single Tandberg Data removable disk unit and it works great. They recently released a multi-drive unit that looks like it would fit your needs. Here is the link:

http://www.tandbergdata.com/emea/index.cfm/corporate/promotions/ipad-promotion/

19

Honestly, I wouldn’t bother with the raid5 solutions. As stated about a billion times across spiceworks, if you love your data, don’t put it on a raid5. I do agree with several others on here about a disk-to-disk-to-tape solution, that really will open your backup window considerably, and let you do your tape dumps during the day and your actual backups whenever. the other really nice thing is- if you do decide to go to something other than tapes (I’ve heard of everything from removable hard-drives to cd/dvd/bd to… well, the list gets huge), doing a disk-to-disk for your initials means you free your back-end long-term storage to be anything you choose, and you can change it as needed.

20

I went D2D2T a few years ago - using a Windows server, an HP 24 tape library, and Acronis. However, Acronis, with support no less, would constantly have issues on running backups, restoring from these backups, and other catalog issues. Reinstalling and starting from scratch TWICE (including wiping all old backups!) really, really sucked. I had multiple restore issues which needed support from lead developers. It got to the point where we actually changed vendors!

I have since been using Roxio Retrospect (aka EMC, aka Dantz) for all of my servers, PCs, Macs, and Linux boxes. (Yup, one stop shop!) The only real problems I have faced are:

  1. Laptops - If only they’d stay still!

  2. DNS requirements - The tool expects DNS resolution for the systems, and windows AD DNS does not always keep up to date, especially for Mac users. I’ve had to statically assign IPs for the Macs.

  3. Wireless Networks - Simply put, never backup over a wireless link

  4. VPN client connections - same deal - don’t choke your bandwidth because someone is being backed up while at home.

  5. Disk space management - the app itself has to keep collecting “sessions” with systems, such as when the laptop gets pulled from the network midsession, and has to keep building until it gets a ‘complete’ backup. This causes some pain because it overfills expected quotas. Keeping 3 hot copies of just /User directories, without Music/Photos can still be in the 200GB+ of local disk space.

  6. Occasional Disk Catalog issues: Because I’ve exceeded quotas, and jobs stop, waiting for more space, the catalogs sometimes get corrupted. The good news is that it has a repair catalog function, the bad news is that it needs one.

Now for the pluses for Retrospect:

One admin interface for everyone, ability to allow users to self-restore items (as if I’d let them do that!) push technology for software updating, 64bit support, restores can be dumped anywhere you want, very granular backup scheduling (has a “wrapup” timer, equivalent to a yellow traffic light, meaning finish if you can in this timeframe, otherwise don’t attempt to start now. Perfect for those people who don’t stay late, or need several hours for full backups) copes well with “protected” disks, I run with EIGHT concurrent backups (100mbit to each box, Gbit to server and switch) has the ability to duplicate/move “snapshots” to other backup catalogs (great for organizing exited users, and other legal history) , a no-brainer when connecting to the HP library, and has yet to fail me when restoring files.

So, in summary:

D2D2T = Very pleased with layout/performance.

Get FAR MORE disk space than you think you’ll EVER need. It gets sucked up seven ways to Sunday, let me tell you. I have 14TB to work with, for 10 servers and 40 users, and it is not really enough anymore.

1 Spice up