- Dec 15, 2015
- 17,189
- 16,342
- 146
All,
Hoping someone in this thread has some experience with small -> medium sized enterprise backup stuff. My environment (relatively small, 80ish servers) is making some changes, among which is shifting to a better off-site backup solution. Presently we have a combination of vmware VDP for VM backups (unfortunately on-host, so in the same rack as the VM), Microsoft DPM, and large scale tape backup system that we basically rent access to.
The tape system is phenomenally slow and access is shared among a few dozen other systems so access is a concern. VDP has the aforementioned issue of being on-host so we can't easily offsite the data, and DPM (where I'm prodding at right now) has a very specific issue in that in order to truly offsite the storage (to Azure, conveniently included in the GUI for DPM) you have to back it up to disk first, which means you need XXTB of storage dedicated to something you're then trying to offsite, which I find phenomenally unhelpful. We're also fully on-prem so built-in cloudy mechanisms aren't helpful to me
So basically, does anyone have thoughts on higher-end backup solutions that meet the following criteria:
Thoughts?
Hoping someone in this thread has some experience with small -> medium sized enterprise backup stuff. My environment (relatively small, 80ish servers) is making some changes, among which is shifting to a better off-site backup solution. Presently we have a combination of vmware VDP for VM backups (unfortunately on-host, so in the same rack as the VM), Microsoft DPM, and large scale tape backup system that we basically rent access to.
The tape system is phenomenally slow and access is shared among a few dozen other systems so access is a concern. VDP has the aforementioned issue of being on-host so we can't easily offsite the data, and DPM (where I'm prodding at right now) has a very specific issue in that in order to truly offsite the storage (to Azure, conveniently included in the GUI for DPM) you have to back it up to disk first, which means you need XXTB of storage dedicated to something you're then trying to offsite, which I find phenomenally unhelpful. We're also fully on-prem so built-in cloudy mechanisms aren't helpful to me
So basically, does anyone have thoughts on higher-end backup solutions that meet the following criteria:
- No stupid home-brew solutions (buy this PCIe card from Latvia and it makes your s3 instance look like a hard drive! Use robocopy plus scripting to do API hooks into your vmware instance!). I won't be the only one managing this and we have enough other garbage on our plate.
- Something vaguely centrally-managed. Trying to not create a half dozen new tools to do a single job, or require components a, b, and c to do what one component should be able to do
- Needs to not require every system to hit the internet. We have some internal systems without internet access and no true proxy deployed (limitation of our environment, not by choice) so it needs to hook into something that can hit the internet, see centrally-managed point.
- Have some capability of incremental/block change based backups (excludes most tape options), and/or dedupe. We're probably looking at 15-30TB right now of full + delta changes, and that will be expanding probably double in the near-future. I'd rather not require hundreds of TB of stuff for a few weeks of snapshots.
- Multi-OS environment would be superb, as we have a few *nix boxes. Also VMware integration for just yanking VM snapshots instead of doing OS level stuff would be neat, I like VDP for this.
Thoughts?
Last edited: