Backup Exec Media - Hard Drive vs Tape Drive

[Chris727]

Hello,

We are currently backing up about 70GB daily per weekday and 200GB on each Saturday.  We are using Backup Exec 11d and a Exabyte VXA-2 10 tape loader that is holding 9 80/160 tapes and one cleaning media.  We have 5 tapes allocated for daily incrementals, two tapes for weekly and two tapes for monthly.  The monthly tapes get switched out at the end of each month and the weeklys at the end of each week.  All idle media is stored at the bank.  The backups consists of data from 5 seperate servers including a SQL 2005 server and an Exchange 2003 server.  As of now we are having to "trim" down what we want backed up from our data backup because it is too large for the weekly backup.  The replacement tapes are costing us around $2200 a year and the total backup time is taking us about 4 - 5 hours nightly and almost 24 hours on the weekend.  We require an additional 20% of data each year to be backed up then the previous year so unless we take action now, we are going to run into issues backing up necessary data.   We are considering building a SATA hot swap server that we can backup to removable hard drives which can then be stored in our safety deposit box.  We would allocate one 500GB hard drive per week and one 500GB for each month and keep historical monthly backups for one year.  Additionally we would have a Raid 5 setup with 3 500GB drives and a hot spair for the daily backups.  I'm trying to get some other perspectives on the situation to find out whether this is a good solution or if there are any better solutions.   Please, any suggestions would be welcome. 

Thanks,

Chris

[R_H_2]

There are a couple things that I can think of that would help reduce your backup window and help with capacity.

You could look into LTO-3 or LTO-4.  Capacity is 400 gig native for LTO-3 and 800 gig native for LTO-4.  Throughputs are about 80 megs a second for LTO-3 and about 160 megs a second for LTO-4.  You'd be looking at far fewer tapes and far higher throughputs.  Tandberg Data/Exabyte (since you have a relationship with them already) has a number of autoloaders and library that have that technology integrated.

If you decide to go with the disk based option, look at Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR).  It looks like a really cool app and it might save you a lot of time with backups.