My boss just presented an interesting idea to me about 30 minutes before the end of the day that hopefully I'll be able to answer for him in the morning. Currently we have BE 10.0 installed on 2 servers, each of which is writing to a tape library (1 via a SAN, the other directly attached). Our normal nightly backup is roughly 300 GB, but the time window is immense due to the 2 jobs involving Exchange (one information store, one brick-level). With the completion of our SAN this weekend, my boss has asked me how much storage I would need in order to move our backups to storage allocated on the SAN. I'd then replicate this data to tape (D2D2T) for long term storage. I can give him a number for that (going w/ 400 GB since I'd rather take it upfront).
The tricky part comes in now: my boss also suggested wanting to use VSS to get snapshots throughout the day to minimize recovery time in the event of a mishap. I'd imagine we'd be using this for SQL and Exchange, as well as Files Shares. Is there any real-world way to calculate this? And more-so, would I need to do the snapshots through the applications and then schedule BE to backup a particular location periodically or can this be done from within BE. We're trying to get the fastest throughput possible without losing any functionality or having much impact on the end users.
I'm fairly comfortable w/ BE, and I've done a bit of reading on VSS (more will follow tonight), but any help anyone can offer would be great.
