NAS server for storage medium

[D_Charles]

hi all,

 I recently bought a dell nx3000 dell server with 4tb of storage so our dev team can store their backups. Problem is I want to also implement backup exec to backup all of our servers, can I use this NAS server as the storage medium for our backups? Let's say I choose one of our VM servers to host the backup exec software, and I install all the agents to the servers I want to back up, can I use the NAS server as the target server to store all these backups?

Is this best practice or should I be looking at another solution method?

Thanks
Charles
 

[Steve_W_]

Please review the technote below for requirements for configuring a backup to disk folder.  You should be able to use it as a storage location as long as it is configured correctly. 

http://support.veritas.com/docs/309595

[B_Michael]

 Hi Charles, You can use NAS as a backup target, but you probably will be unimpressed with the performance.

You really need to study some best practices on data protection and develop a strategy.   There's information out there at sites such as SNIA.Org
For instance, 
- How long are you going to keep backup data around (What's your archive retention time)?  If you use the standard weekly full, daily incremental, you'll fill up terabytes quicker than you think.
- To what granularity do you need to have restores?  Will you ever need to restore back to Thursday, two weeks ago?   What's your plan for being able to do that?
- What laws or regulations or business practices govern the retention of data? 
- If your NAS/backup box is located in the same room or building as your servers, what happens to yourbackup data if there's a fire/flood/theft/earthquake?
- If you are the backup guy, and it's your job... do you have control over that NAS system to make sure that it's being managed to appropriate standards to ensure the integrity of your backup data?  What happens if that team decides to implement a different strategy, and the machine goes away (suddenly)?
- Have you considered all the costs of backup to disk vs. backup to tape, including acquisition cost and electricity?

[D_Charles]

 Hi both, thanks for the info, a lot of that is fine for a large business, but I am talking about backing up a total of 10 servers. Total storage will be in the 500 G mark. 

What do you mean I will be unimpressed with its performance? If its on a gigabit network won't that suffice? WHat do you suggest if not a NAS server?

We do not want the cost of having someone come in and replace tapes everyday, so we definitely want backup to disk. We have another colocation and was thinking of placing another NAS server there and have the backup server archive to the other NAS server in colocation 2. Data only needs to be retained for the past 2 weeks.

[B_Michael · Accepted solution]

 Thanks for the additional info, it's helpful in helping suggest solutions.

I've benchmarked backup jobs under ideal conditions (really fast servers, dedicated Ethernet, tuned drivers, huge files) at over 110MB/sec over GbE -- so GbE is not the bottleneck; the bottleneck will either be the speed of your servers reading the source files (Windows NTFS is a pretty slow file system, particularly as you get to small files, deeply nested directories, fragmentation, and contention from other processes), or, the limitation of your NAS target in accepting multiple simultaneous backup streams.

I'm glad to hear that you're considering using a second location to have a copy of your backup data.  "Backup" data stored at the same location is just a copy, not a backup.

One thing you might want to consider is a dedicated virtual tape library (VTL).  These devices have several advantages over a NAS target:
- They are optimized as backup targets, designed to simultaneously accept multiple incoming streams.  They manage things like defragmentation internally, without you needing to do anything, and seem to be virus-immune, since they only present themselves as a tape library and no virus targets tape libraries.
- They perform deduplication -- built in to the device is code that checks to see if incoming blocks have been seen before, and if so, stores only a pointer to the existing data.  This allows you to keep, typically, six months of backup data in the space that would store only two weeks' worth without deduplication.
- They perform low-bandwidth replication, allowing you to send only the changes (and some minimal metadata) from the main device to the replication target, to give a copy of the source data at the remote location over a much slower link than with a full copy.
- It's a dedicated backup device, so you don't have to worry about contention for disk space from the guys wanting to use it as primary storage.
- It looks to your software like one or more tape libraries, so you don't have to change familiar backupprocesses or backup applications.
- They use the free iSCSI protocol, so the data is going over your existing GbE infrastructure (many Fibre Channel models are also available, but most small business only has Ethernet).

If you're interested in this kind of technology, do a search for "D2D Backup".  HP makes one that's really attractively priced for your capacities.   See the D2D2500 Backup System at http://www.hp.com/go/d2d .

Hope this serves your need.

Michael