Forum Discussion

Loams's avatar
Loams
Level 2
15 years ago

Backup Exec 2010 New Installation

Hi Everyone,

I would like some help on speccing a solution, specifically pertaining to the deduplication option

I have a WAN with 7 branches and 17 Servers that need backing up centrally.

What I am propsing is that we install a single media server that does the initial full backup and then runs incremental backups daily. But I am not sure if this is the best way.

I am not sure exactly what the client wants to back up, and that is something we are dealing with tomorrow, but in the meantime I am curious about the deduplication. How does BE2010 deal with de-dup? Does it send the data to the media server which then deals with the de-dup or does the agent on the target server deal with it before it is sent via the WAN to the media server?

Would it be better to have a CASO at HQ and a media server on each site instead? I am not sure how that would impact my bandwidth usage?

Let me ask this.

1. How does one set up a backup on a media server at SiteA, which is then replicated to SiteB?
2. Is it better for bandwidth to have it the abovementioned way, or is it better to have a single Media server backing up all servers... Bearing in mind that the sites are geographically dispersed.

Please ask for clarification if you misunderstand.. I am probably not expressing myself clearly.

Thanks in advance
2010
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    15 years ago
    Mmm...
    What you would most likely then have to do is do full backups on a site, and ship the tape to your central site. From there, restore to a folder. Then configure BEWS 2010 to ship the deduped data to that site once it has deduped to disk.
    As you know though, SA doesn't have the most competitive telecommunications companies, making T1/T3 etc lines only for the biggest of clients.
    We use CASO only as a central monitoring point. Nothing more...some of our lines go into Africa as well across a sat link, so they are very slow at times...pretty pointless initiating backups, or copying data across them.
    Best thing to do is to make your client aware of what they could be facing when it stops them working on their critical systems, such as SAP, email etc.

    Laters!
  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    15 years ago
    Hi there,

    Well, depending on where you are in the world, doing a central backup MIGHT be the way to go. Here in South Africa, that doesn't go down too well =P
    That said, there is some argument for keeping your backups locally. Restores are going to be a lot quicker, as would backups. using BEWS 2010, you can do dedupe backups, and then ship that dedupe information to a central server. however, you're looking at a lot of WAN impact in terms of traffic.
    I would do things the following way (assuming you cannot have any tape drives/disk arrays on those sites):

    1. Install a central server to run Backup Exec with the CASO option enabled. Setting your catalog location here is critical. If you have very fast WAN links, you can look into replicating your catalogs from your backup servers to the CASO server. in the event of a site backup server dying, you will have your catalogs on the CASO that you can copy out.

    2. Load up BEWS on each of the 7 sites on 1 server, with the necessary agents (SQL, Lotus Notes etc), and install the RAWS agents on your servers that need backing up. Configure your jobs to point to the local backup device. For dedupe, you need disk space locally, as it won't dedupe to tape. However, you can then ship dedupe information to tape, or another site.

    Doing deduplication is local anyway. But backing up ACROSS your WAN is probably going to have more of an impact than shipping the information to your central site.
    Still, first prize for me is having all your backups done locally without having to ship data across your WAN.

    Laters!
  • Loams's avatar
    Loams
    Level 2
    15 years ago
    Thanks for the input

    I must be honest, I don't like the central backing up option unless there is local backups done first. I understand the importance for the speed of restore... Now to get the client to understand this.

    We're also in South Africa.... We calculated that we can backup 6GB data every 8 hours or so.... Gosh, I hope it's enough..

    Any other ideas?
  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    15 years ago
    Mmm...
    What you would most likely then have to do is do full backups on a site, and ship the tape to your central site. From there, restore to a folder. Then configure BEWS 2010 to ship the deduped data to that site once it has deduped to disk.
    As you know though, SA doesn't have the most competitive telecommunications companies, making T1/T3 etc lines only for the biggest of clients.
    We use CASO only as a central monitoring point. Nothing more...some of our lines go into Africa as well across a sat link, so they are very slow at times...pretty pointless initiating backups, or copying data across them.
    Best thing to do is to make your client aware of what they could be facing when it stops them working on their critical systems, such as SAP, email etc.

    Laters!
  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    15 years ago
    Hi Loams,

    Have you come right here? If so, can you mark off as a solution?

    Laters!