Hey Spiceheads,
So i’ve been tasked recently with going over our financial budgets across all IT related components within the company to see if there are places where we can find savings. This may be by finding a free or cheaper solution, or by teaming up with our corporate office and the contracts they have with vendors to reduce prices further.
So one of the things I looked over breifly was backups. We use Networker and have a D2D2T system that pulls data from the servers, backs it up to a VERY old SAN (2 TB capacity) and then writes that to tape. Those tapes are sent to Iron mountain on a weekly basis and we have a 1 year tape cycle.
What I am curious about is what solutions we should be looking into and if off-site tape storage is something we even need to invest in considering we have a rather large fire-proof safe (not sure the exact rating).
Our environment is quite old (we’re behind the times with a lot of things).
Most of our servers are physical with only 1 VMWare ESXi host and a single VMWare Server 2.0 host. Everything else is physical. We do not host exchange here, and our biggest databases are Windchill, and Lotus Notes (yes i know…)
Appreciate any and all suggestions, please let me know if you need any additional information or if there is something I am missing in my descriptions.
4 Spice ups
I guess the the first things I’m thinking is:
- How many servers?
- How much data?
- What kind of data?
- What’s your connectivity (if any) to your HQ?
- What product(s) do they use?
- What’s it costing you right now?
- What doesn’t it do that you feel you’re missing?
Hi Tan,
Putting a copy of its backups off-line is always a good practice. An alternative to sending tapes to Iron Mountain (or an other office site) that we have seen progressing the past few years, is hybrid-cloud backup architectures where you keep a local copy of the backups on disk and replicate over the WAN to an other company site, a private or a public cloud.
The main technical constraint remains volume of data vs. WAN bandwidth; however deduplication and seed & feed features have helped a lot to push that barrier.
If you wish, you can contact one of our SEs to get some help to see if this could work for your data volume.
Cheers!
I don’t know how much Iron Mountain folks charge you, but a safe deposit box at the bank would probably be a cheaper alternative.
What are your specific VMWare back-up requirements?
D-Link partners with VEAMM, which makes a good backup package at reasonable prices?
http://www.veeam.com/buy-veeam-products-pricing.html?ad=menu-line
1 Spice up
