Doing without tape.

[Bengaul]

Hi all,

We are looking to do without tapes in our backup arsenal. We want to go from disk to disk to tape, to disk to disk to disk. I am after advice as to the best way to go about it. What do we need to to accomplish this? Do we need to simply add cheap disks to a server, or some type of storage unit, and add that to the media, or do we need to archive? 

Many thanks,

Ben.

[CraigV]

Hi,

Best way around this would be a SAN, especially if you have a number of large servers (like File/Exchange etc) that you can add to a SAN. You'd load BE on each of these servers, and target them at disk presented from a SAN device. This is the expensive route...

Another option is to look at NAS...specifically NAS that allows you to present iSCSI LUNs from them to a server. This has the benefit of using your existing LAN (no need to purchase anything new, as long as you're on existing 1GB switches), your drives appear as local drives to the server, and you can run multiple back up jobs at the same time to the NAS, so making backups theoretically faster.

Ideally you're looking at having 2, especially if you want to go the route of D2D2D. You'd have it running as follows:

1. BE backs up to disk presented from the NAS. This is the primary job.

2. Once the job completes, run a duplicate job that duplicates the recent backup set to disk presented from the other NAS.

You don't have all your eggs in 1 basket, should 1 NAS fail. Check the BE 2010 HCL below for further information on which NAS devices are supported:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH137050

We use Iomega NAS's of various models (StorCenter Pro ix4-200r; px12-350r) and they work well with iSCSI LUNs.

Just spec each NAS with more than enough disk space, depending on your backup strategy.

USB drives are a lot cheaper, but you'll run into issues with speed during backups as well as possible B2Ds being offline during backups.

Thanks!

[Bengaul]

Hi,

Thanks for this. We currently back up to a SAN, roughly 2TB of data to a dedupe folder, then off to tape. If we were to invest in a NAS as replacement for the tape drive, would we treat it as we did the tape drive, or can we use deuplication?

Where would something like archival sit in this scenario?

Ben.

[CraigV]

Tough 1 to answer, but I'd say yes in a way. The NAS would be duplicated too...you don't back up the dedupe folder to it. It basically copies what you have done in the previous backup, and this ensures the catalogs aren't messed up.

I'd use the NAS as the archival part of your equation, leaving your SAN for faster backups and restores.

[Ken_Putnam]

In your planning don't forget to include some kind of off-site storage as well

Multiple Disk backups in the same buiding, even on different  hardware, doen't do much good if your entire building were to be severely damaged somehow

You could replace the tapes in your currect setup with eSATA drives, or add eSATA to the setup discussed by Craig

[teiva-boy]

Small point of clarification.  

NAS cannot be used for the deduplication folder.  Block level disk only.  FC, iSCSI, SCSI, USB, etc.  No CIFS or NFS access.

You also can only have one dedupe folder per BackupExec media server.  So if it's on SAN, you can grow that one out, you can't add another location.  Though you can move locations through documented procedures.

A number of NAS devices, both inexpensive SOHO types, and enterprise devices do offer replication.  So it could save you from doing it within BackupExec which isn't the most efficient in that particular case.  Either they use snapshot technologies or RSYNC.  BackupExec would be the slowest of the options for NAS to NAS replication.

[Bengaul]

Do I want to duplicate the DeDupe folder? Would that not cause problems restoring the data?

[CraigV]

...you might want to check out the Best Practices for dedupe...

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO21767

As long as you are duplicating the data elsewhere, you'd have no issues restoring from there. If you were backing up the dedupe folder directly it can cause issues with catalogs, and therefore restores too...

[Colin_Weaver]

The private cloud document is also worth a read - just read it was if the VPN link to the ISP  is actually a relaible WAN link to another location in your own company for it to make sense in a WAN environment.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH172464

[Bengaul]

It's going slightly off topic, as I don't need best prctice for DeDupe, I need best practice for backing up DeDupe. If I simply do a copy of the data, you are saying that I could restore from a cloned DeDupe folder?

[CraigV]

No, not quite going off-topic. If you read the article it gives you some pointers on what to consider when duplicating the data.

Duplicating your data elsewhere is simply a copy of that data...you should have no issues restoring from it, but you would obviously have to add that folder in as a dedupe store.