Experience Backing up over a 10Mbps Lan?

[sammyc53]

Has anyone had good success backing up servers over a 10mbps (1.2MB/s) wide area network connection?

That connection will also be used as our Internet connection for our clients and server, so we can't really max out the pipe...

Ie, our Exchange backup is 100GB. Would that backup complete in the theoritcal transfer time of 20 hours? (100GB divided by 4.5GB/hour)

Could we send duplicate jobs over that connection to a shared drive or ftp site?

Any advice is appreciated, thanks.

[Deepali_Badave]

Hello,

Do you have any communication failure related issues while using the 10Mbps Lan?

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[Richard_Whitwor]

This doesn't sound like a good idea!

Even if you got the theoretical maximum transfer rate (which you won't), as you say you're talking about 20 hours, this only leaves a 4 hour window while your connection is not being hammered by backup traffic and hence causing service level issues for your users and other services using the connection.

Of course you could look at doing incremental backups, but presumably this won't help much in the case of the Exchange databases since it would backup the whole of the file rather than the changes to the file?

Also neither of these scenarios takes into account that you're not doing a brick level backupof the stores (which will increase the time for the backup enormously) and so you're losing a lot of the functionality that BE offers.

IMO your best bet is to install backup hardware at the site and backup locally.

If you're looking to get resilience by backing up offsite you probably need to be looking at something like Neverfail for Exchange or Sunbelt software's DoubleTake to replicate between sites. Both of these are byte by byte, real time solutions - ie. they only replicate the actual changes to the files and hence keep bandwidth utilitsation low. They're not cheap though to buy or implement though.....Message was edited by:
Richard Whitworth

[Amruta_Bhide]

Hello Sam,
Could you Update us on the Issue?

Do you need more help?

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Thanks.

[Hywel_Mallett]

Like others, I think the backup over WAN solution wouldn't be very good.
Have you considered replication from the branch site to the main site? Veritas Replication Exec would do this, as would many other solutions (e.g. Microsoft DFS).

[Richard_Whitwor]

I am not sure about replication exec but DFS/FRS will still replicate the whole database file if as it changes, not the changes to the file - so you'd be looking at replicating a 100GB file every time a change occured, or even if you set the replication schedule to out of hours, its still going to take 20 hours as before - not good.

Doubletake, for example, only replicates the bits and bytes that have actually changed within the file hence you don't consume much bandwidth over a WAN link.

[Hywel_Mallett]

Windows 2003 R2 will only replicate the changes I think. As will Replication Exec and Veritas Volume Replicator.

[Richard_Whitwor]

I've just checked that as I remember reading about some big improvements to DFS and it looks like you are right - if you have an R2 Enterprise edition server as one of the DFS replication partner it can detect and replicate changes in the files - cool! - it would be interesting to see how small these changes are that it replicates though and whether its as efficient as the third party products we've been discussing.

[sammyc53]

Thanks guys, thats good info.

It looks like I need to look into some brick level backup, or replication.