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We’re currently using backup exec to backup around 35-40tb weekly on a 4 week cycle. This is backed up to tape using 5 jobs and 5 tape drives. It’s just about getting the job done but can be a bit inconsistent with speed, occasionaly tape errors etc, it’s expensive, basically we want a new solution.

Disk based storage seems to have a lot of benefits, especially with deduplication and we could always archive to tape from the disk backup if needs be.

We currently retain one set of the data each month permenantly, which we’d probably still need to do but within the disk storage rather than tape. So disk storage would need to be the region of hundreds of TBs.

Essentially what I’d like to know is what are people using to backup this amount of data, general pointers on software, hardware etc

thanks in advance for any ideas…

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I am sorry.

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Physical Servers or Virtual Server? Both?

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Ah good point! Mostly physical, some hyper-v but non crucial servers.

The vast majority of the data is file storage, on equallogic sans, served by Dell R720’s running server 2008 r2. This is the side i’m mostly interested in, the application side is only a small percentage of the jobs.

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What’s the budget? Unitrends would be excellent but with this much data, it is going to be costly.

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Bit of a grey area currently, basically want to see what’s out there and the varying costs, so if it’s costly but does the job then long term that’s better than cost saving but having an insufficient solution.

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Veeam is by far the best for VMs. However it will not do physical server so that’s probably not helpful to you. I have also used Acronis which will do both but I must strongly recommend against using Acronis as it was a complete nightmare the entire time we had it.

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My experience with Acronis has been mixed.

Sometimes it works excellent. Sometimes, it completely sucks.

Because of this I have been trying to stay clear of it.

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Since the pricing structure for backup solutions varies, the first thing I would do is look specifically at an option that charges by machine/vm and not by storage. It sounds like you have the perfect setup for a software-only solution, with few servers and massive storage needs. Looking at any physical appliance with that kind of storage would cost a fortune!

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Not too sure what you mean when you say software only solution?

Whatever the solution we surely need 2 things (1. the backup software and 2. the storage medium to backup to)

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There are 2 basic backup solutions; software-only and appliance. Unitrends, for example has both the virtual appliance UEB (no physical device to buy, just the software) and their line of physical appliances. Physical appliances have internal storage. Getting up to 150TB of storage would cost a pretty penny. Going with a software-only solution means you provide your own network-attached storage. That route is definitely the cheaper way to go.

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Dedupe, to me, is a very minor benefit. The big benefit is insanely rapid restores and recovery.

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Appliance (all in one hardware + software) is the hot “new” thing in backup and very rapidly becoming the most common approach in the SMB space.

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I’ve had bad client experiences with Acronis (as in, my clients have had issues with it.)

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Couldn’t agree more. It’s all about restores!

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You can do Unitrends by resource rather than by TB. Depends on the situation.

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We should refer to the systems as restore systems, not backup systems. If they could restore without doing a backup, they’d remain just as useful. But like many have experienced, doing a good backup that you can’t restore remains completely useless.

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Yes. That is something that seems to be a little-known fact. They can price either way ( /client or /TB)

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Interesting, I never knew that.

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For 100TB+ backups, consider Zetta.net 's enterprise backup & DR solution. The benefits it delivers for large data size backups include:

  1. Local storage agnostic: Enables you to use any local storage media, and avoid paying a premium for appliance hardware

  2. Fastest tested offsite backup: Backup or recover up to 4TB a day directly to/from the cloud, depending on your bandwidth

  3. Scale rapidly up or down: Zetta has many current customers backing up hundreds of TBs, and the ability to add large amounts of data quickly is critical for them.

Finally, as always, don’t trust me: start a trial and see how it works for you. Or just get custom pricing and see if we’re in the ballpark.