Backup over VPN connection

[rbottse]

Good afternoon,

For a customer I'm looking for a solution with the functionalities described below. I think that I can offer the functionalities with Symantec products, but I have no experience in this area. So please advise me which product and add-ons I need.

The customer has 2 locations with  each approx. 5TB of Data. No Exchange or SQL data, normal data.

We want to backup Location 1 to Location 2 and vice verse.

On both locations, there will be storage attached to the server dedicated for the backup.

Since the intial backup will take long over the internet (site to site VPN connection of 10MB) we want to place a base image on the other location and from there on, the incremental backups are made daily in the evening.

Is this all possible and if so, what product and add on(s) do I need.

Thank you all for the help.

Kind regards,

Roy

[teiva-boy]

BackupExec does not handle WAN links well, and over a VPN will only make it worse.  A single droppd packet will fail the entire job.

PureDisk or NetBackup is actually the better product to use.  Both have features that make it work better with slow links, high latency links, and dropped packets.  

NetBackup has something called check-point restarts.  So it writes a marker at timed intervals (you set this value), and if the job fails, it will pick up right where it wrote the last marker.  Combined with the deduplication option, this is an acceptable combo

PureDisk only sends the segments (smaller than files) that are new and unique.  So if a job failed, again, it would only send what the PureDisk server doesn't already have stored.  It also caches the files that it has sent, read, etc.  This cache table that is local, makes for less over all communication over the WAN to compare file segments.  This is the preferred solution between the three I've mentioned.

Note NetBackup and PureDIsk are both significantly more expensive than NBU.  Though, both are "enterprise," class products, and their price reflects that.

Both would also allow for seeding backups too, so that only an incremental and such had to be sent.

[pkh]

As said previously, BE does not link poor communication links.  However, there is one way to minimise the traffic across the WAN link.  You use dedup on both ends and then use optimised dedup to duplicate the data across the link.  Only the changed data blocks would be transmitted across the link.

Do note that you CANNOT do incremental backups forever.  This is because when you do a restore you need to restore the last full backup plus ALL the incremental backups since the last full backup.  Imagine if you take a full backup once a month.  If you need to restore the server at the end of the month, you would need to restore the full backup plus 30 incremental backups.  I would think that the greatest interval between full backups would be a week.