I need help with an enterprise backup solution..

[MrEgo]

We have a dilemna here where I work.

-Our weekly backup of data is about 1TB.

-We're using 9 Exabyte X23 80/160GB VXA-2 tapes per backup (getting about 120GB out of each tape).

-Our backup device only has 10 slots, so we're nearing our capacity to backup.

-We do not have enough tapes to perform daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups due to our backup size. We need about 88 more tapes to do this.


We're not sure if there's any cost-effective way (around $5,000) to accomplish a reliable backup for 1TB of data, weekly. We need our backups to be saved or stored in an off-site location to follow our disaster-recovery policy.

Our current tape backup solution is nearing the end of it's life, it seems. We do not have enough tapes as it is to retain monthly backups, and I'm worried that our backup will grow larger than our hardware will support (1.6TB - assuming all of your tapes will hold 160GB of data, which they don't).

I looked into upgrading our backup hardware from VXA-2 to VXA-320.. which supposedly doubles the capacity of the X23 tapes that we're using now, but that'll still cost about $4,000 after considering how many more tapes we would still need, plus the price of the backup device itself.

So basically, what I'm asking is, is there a good solution out there that isn't tens of thousands of dollars that will accomodate our needs? I realize that we might be taking an awful risk by not having a top-notch backup solution by spending any less than that, but I was hoping that there would be a cheaper way to do it that didn't sacrifice too much reliability?

 

[drebo]

You're going to want an LTO-4 solution. 800gb native/1.6tb compressed storage (Edit: that's per tape). And they're FAST.

IMO, LTO is the best backup solution on the market today.

If it's not fast enough to do during off-peak times, you could set up a BackupEXEC CPS server and then run the backups off of that, as there would be no performance hindering to normal application use.

 

[MrEgo]

Well, as of right now, our full backups are taking about 62 hours. Since we run them on the weekends, it will complete JUST before working hours on Monday morning.

It sounds like this would be significantly faster. It looks like we could get a solution going for about $5,000 - $7,000, depending on how much we want to futureproof our backup size limit.

1.6TB might be cutting it too close.. I think we would need at least double that to make room for expansion.. if we ever needed it. I'm still researching this though.. and it looks like it would perfectly suit our needs - thanks!

Our sales rep from one of our vendors suggested this, but 4 of them, totalling over $8,000:
Buffalo Terastation Pro II 4TB Rack

Any reason he did not suggest an LTO-4 solution? I told him that we were on a limited budget.

 

[drebo]

That NAS solution WILL NOT cut it for you. It will be FAR too slow, and VERY insecure.

He probably didn't suggest an LTO solution because he's new, ignorant, inexperienced. You can't take a NAS box home with you. They're VERY slow, particularly those SOHO variants. Enterprise backup basically limits you to a highly redundant SAN with offsite replication or tape. Tape is what's in your budget range.

These drives write at approximately 120 MB/s. That translates into about 400GB per hour. That should be plenty fast for a daily back up, even at a full 1.6TB.

If you're concerned with future-proofing/expansion, my advice would be something along the lines of this tape autoloader.

If you want a disk-based backup solution, I saw a pretty neat solution at Interop last weekend that consisted of self-contained RAID cartridges that were removable, expandable, and sat in a high-speed eSATA chassis. I'm not sure about the speed of such a device, but I can guarantee it'll be faster than a SOHO NAS box like the one above.

 

[Jamsan]

I second the LTO-4 route. We use LTO-2 drives at work (about 700GB of data and growing). We currently run FULL nightly backups. All of our backups finish typically within 12 hours, and only use 1 1/2 tapes per job.

You could also look into going LTO-3. They support 800GB compressed, which would put you at about 2-3 tapes per backup. The tapes are about half the price, and I'm sure the drives are cheaper as well. With an LTO-4 solution, you're looking at ~$120 for WORM tapes, and atleast $2,500 for a single tape drive w/o an autoloader.

What kind of budget are you working with?

 

[RebateMonger]

Have you taken a look at Disk-2-Disk hot-swap-hard-drive backups? As data collections become larger, tape is having a REALLY hard time keeping up. Many of my small business clients are pushing 1 TB of data nowadays.

You can get ten 1 TB SATA drives in removable housings for around $2500 or less. If you combine them with backup software that performs data compression, you should be able to easily backup up your data in a LOT less than 60 hours. Each 1 TB drive should hold around 1.4 TB of data with compression. By the time the 1 TB drives are too small, you'll be able to buy 2 TB drives.

There's no need for redundant RAID in the backup system itself. Tapes don't have RAID, either. Pull the most recent backup off-site each day and institute whatever archiving system seems appropriate to your business.

When a removable hard drive fails, just replace it. It's a lot cheaper than replacing a failed tape system of that capacity.

Buy a 1TB SATA hard drive, download a trial version of some suitable backup software, and give it a try. You can always find a use for the 1 TB drive if you decide not to go that way.

 

[Jamsan]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Have you taken a look at Disk-2-Disk hot-swap-hard-drive backups? As data collections become larger, tape is having a REALLY hard time keeping up. Many of my small business clients are pushing 1 TB of data nowadays.

You can get ten 1 TB SATA drives in removable housings for around $2500 or less. If you combine them with backup software that performs data compression, you should be able to easily backup up your data in a LOT less than 60 hours. Each 1 TB drive should hold around 1.4 TB of data with compression. By the time the 1 TB drives are too small, you'll be able to buy 2 TB drives.

There's no need for redundant RAID in the backup system itself. Tapes don't have RAID, either. Pull the most recent backup off-site each day and institute whatever archiving system seems appropriate to your business.

When a removable hard drive fails, just replace it. It's a lot cheaper than replacing a failed tape system of that capacity.

Buy a 1TB SATA hard drive, download a trial version of some suitable backup software, and give it a try. You can always find a use for the 1 TB drive if you decide not to go that way.

That's a very unique (unique in the sense that this is the first time I've really heard anyone talking about this sort of implementation) way of performing backups. The only real downside I see is the ability to store the drives off-site with various data recovery vendors. I know Iron Mountain has a size limitation (I think the size of normal LTO tapes in cases) with certain plans. At the same time, alot of SMBs don't really invest in off-site vaulting unless it is required by some sort of compliance requirements, and usually take the latest backup off-site to one's home, bank safety deposit back, etc.

 

[drebo]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
There's no need for redundant RAID in the backup system itself. Tapes don't have RAID, either. Pull the most recent backup off-site each day and institute whatever archiving system seems appropriate to your business.

The idea behind the self-contained RAID cartridges, as I understand it, is not necessarily for redundancy, but for a combination of speed, fault tolerance, and space efficiency. Honestly, though, I'm not a big fan of disk-based backups. Magnetic tape is just so much cleaner and more permanant than moving platters and heads.

My recommendation is still an LTO-4 drive. Of all of them that I've sold, I've never had an LTO drive go bad, and the tapes are far cheaper than a 1TB drive. LTO has yet to let me down.

 

[MerlinRML]

Originally posted by: drebo
The idea behind the self-contained RAID cartridges, as I understand it, is not necessarily for redundancy, but for a combination of speed, fault tolerance, and space efficiency. Honestly, though, I'm not a big fan of disk-based backups. Magnetic tape is just so much cleaner and more permanant than moving platters and heads.

My recommendation is still an LTO-4 drive. Of all of them that I've sold, I've never had an LTO drive go bad, and the tapes are far cheaper than a 1TB drive. LTO has yet to let me down.

RAID as an offsite backup is a terrible idea. You have to hope that you will have a comparable controller when you need to recover and that your mode of RAID will not have more failures than it can handle during disk transport or storage.

However, disk very much has its place in enterprise backup. It's faster than tape both to backup and to recover. It makes a great nearline storage for quick recovery of recent backups and is fast enough to keep the nightly backup windows small. It's then simple to move your backups to tape for offsite storage.

As for your LTO-4 recommendation, you're spot on. I've used LTO1-3 and was always happy. The only thing I don't like about tapes is having to crawl inside the big robots to eject tapes when they get stuck and having to remove miles of tape off a tape spool when the leader breaks.

Tapes when used in large quantities will always beat the prices of hard drives. In the short term, tape drives (and especially libraries) are more expensive than hard drives, but the savings comes in having LOTS of replaceable tape over long periods of time.

 

[MrEgo]

If these LTO-4 tapes can sustain ~400GB/hr... that would be fantastic. Like I said, our full backups are taking about 62 hours to complete right now. Having a full backup done in 3 hours or less would be great!

How about this one: Tandberg Data Magnum 1x7 tape autoloader - LTO-4 Ultrium SCSI

We could probably get that one for around $4,200.

We would need about 21 tapes:
4 daily
4 weekly
12 monthly
1 yearly

That would bring the cost up to around $6,500.. which sounds very reasonable for a realiable enterprise backup solution.

We do have to follow some compliance guidelines (taking the tapes to a safety deposit box daily), so this seems like it would be perfect for what we need. The thought of only having to use ONE tape instead of 10..

What's a typical compression ratio that I can expect from these LTO-4 tapes? With the X23 tapes, we would probably average around 1.35:1 compression.. which didn't seem very good to me, but maybe that's the norm.

 

[mooseracing]

We dropped the tapes and went to 1TB drives, were not using all of that space yet in single backup jobs but it allows us to maintain quaterly backups. The SATA drives are alot faster.

 

[drebo]

Originally posted by: MerlinRML
RAID as an offsite backup is a terrible idea. You have to hope that you will have a comparable controller when you need to recover and that your mode of RAID will not have more failures than it can handle during disk transport or storage.

You're not paying attention to what I'm saying. You're assuming that I'm talking about a solution that just takes a group of drives, throws them in a RAID, and copies data over. That's not at all what I'm talking about, but because people here are close-minded and unimatinative, I'm not going to bother any more with this train of thought.

LTO is the way to go, and Tandberg is as good a drive as any. That tape autoloader will fit your bill, and that price is very good. Check your sourcess, though...you should be able to find it for a better price than CDW lists it for from a local reseller (my distributor gets it to me cheap enough to sell it for less than that). Also, tapes should run about $100. I generally use Maxell tapes as they're cheaper than Tandberg branded tapes and I haven't had many problems with them.

Just make sure you get a cleaning cartridge or two as well.

What's a typical compression ratio that I can expect from these LTO-4 tapes? With the X23 tapes, we would probably average around 1.35:1 compression.. which didn't seem very good to me, but maybe that's the norm.

It depends on the type of data you're using. I've got one customer that's getting about 430GB on a 200GB LTO-2 tape, for a compression ratio over 2:1. I've got another customer that's getting about 1.6:1. Obviously, text compresses better than ultra-high resolution images (first case vs last case). What kinds of data are you working with?

 

[drebo]

Originally posted by: mooseracing
We dropped the tapes and went to 1TB drives, were not using all of that space yet in single backup jobs but it allows us to maintain quaterly backups. The SATA drives are alot faster.

I'd be interested in finding a SATA drive that writes at 120MB/second. Show me where I can find one with that kind of compatibility.

 

[MrEgo]

What kind of compression ratio are you typically seeing on your LTO-4 tapes?

*edit - nevermind, you already answered that in your edit

*edit 2 - it's a mixture of all data. Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Access Databases, images, CAD drawings, you name it.

 

[drebo]

You'll probably see close to 2:1 then with your data set.

I'm continually astounded at the level of quality Ultrium drives have.

 

[MrEgo]

Just out of curiousity.. will the LTO-4 tapes work side-by-side with LTO-2 or LTO-3 during the same backup?

For example, assume my backups ever reached 1.7TB. Would I be able to use an LTO-4 tape with an LTO-2 or LTO-3 tape to complete the backup? I know this is a cheap route, but times are tough here.

 

[drebo]

Tandberg's LTO-4 drive is capable of reading and writing both LTO-4 and LTO-3 media, however it will only read LTO-2 media.

So, yes, if you believe that LTO-3 media will fit your bill, you can save some money now and then upgrade to LTO-4 media at a later time.

 

[MrEgo]

Just to make sure we're on the same page:

If I had an LTO-4 tape in Slot 1 and and LTO-3 tape in Slot 2, could I perform a theoretical backup of 2.4TB? (1.6TB for the LTO-4, plus the 0.8TB for the LTO-3)?

I was just wondering in the case that our backups exceeded one LTO-4 tape.. would I have to keep my media the same, or can it work with different media at the same time?

 

[mooseracing]

Originally posted by: drebo

Originally posted by: mooseracing
We dropped the tapes and went to 1TB drives, were not using all of that space yet in single backup jobs but it allows us to maintain quaterly backups. The SATA drives are alot faster.

I'd be interested in finding a SATA drive that writes at 120MB/second. Show me where I can find one with that kind of compatibility.

Is it getting that kind of throughput? Or is that just what the manufacture states. Right now I get in the 50-70 MB/s range with a cheap pci card. I would expect better if I jumped to PCI-e or built on the mobo.

 

[mooseracing]

dp

 

[drebo]

Originally posted by: MrEgo
Just to make sure we're on the same page:

If I had an LTO-4 tape in Slot 1 and and LTO-3 tape in Slot 2, could I perform a theoretical backup of 2.4TB? (1.6TB for the LTO-4, plus the 0.8TB for the LTO-3)?

I was just wondering in the case that our backups exceeded one LTO-4 tape.. would I have to keep my media the same, or can it work with different media at the same time?

That's a good question. I'm not entirely sure. I would assume that would be the case, but you know what they say about assuming.

Give Tandberg a call and ask them. They're usually pretty responsive to tech support questions like that.

 

[skyking]

Sort of off topic, but what is the daily differential? how much data changes/is added?
I wonder if some sort of incremental off-site system would work.

 

[drebo]

For the daily's maybe, but it looks like they also want weekly, monthly, and yearly snapshots.

 

[skyking]

That same offsite system could build those too. Just daydreaming out loud. I use an application called dirvish to back up linux systems.

 

[MrEgo]

Daily differentials are about 60GB. And yes, we need complete weekly, montly, and yearly backups stored off-site. Can you explain a little bit more about what you're referring to, skyking?