Will BackupExec work for this scenario? (Rapid recovery of 5TB of data)

[jitsupport]

Hi there, wondering if BackupExec is the right solution for this...

Here's our issue:

We have a client who has tons of data. About 25 TB of file data. Windows (NTFS). No databases, but the files are hard to deal with... There's tons and tons of small files.

The client is a very small business so their budget it limited.

Questions:

- In the event of a disaster, they need to be able to immediately restore access to 5 TB of data. With traditional archiving, this is impossible because it would take days to de-archive 5TB of data back into a normal file system. Is there some feature in BackupExec that lets you access backup data instantly? Ex: "mount" specific backups instantly onto a virtual drive for read/write access? Please send a link to more info if this is possible.

- The data is spread out on about 5 Windows servers. If we had one backup server with one license to BackupExec, would that be enough to perform these backups over network shares? They do not have the budget for multiple licenses to BE or for the Windows agents at this time.

- Just checking, I think they would want the deduplication option. It's expensive for them, but worth it, I think. Just ensure the dedup is stable for these situations of massive amounts of data.

We've been burned with backup software that just can't handle data on the 25 TB level with millions upon millions of small files, so we want to ensure this works for them.

[teiva-boy]

BackupExec system recovery could handle this, or whatever Symantec decided to rename it to (3rd time in a handful of years!)

Though you would need an equiv backkup to disk volume with 25TB of space to back up to, and 5 licenses.  

The important thing to know is that as RTO's get shorter, price goes up.  If the data is really important to them for their business, than they need to invest in the software to achieve the business requirements!

[Lesta_G]

You need to differentiate between disaster recovery and backup

If your RTO is zero as you describe,then you need a mirrored SAN at another datacentre. full stop, period , exclamation mak.

Depending on what/where the 5TB of 25TB is, you could use Windows DFS on another local or remote server.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732863(v=ws.10).aspx

But first you/they  need to know the risks and threats of the environment and what you need to do mitigate them.

It is irrelevant if they are a small business or large, they need to understand the value of their data, relevant to their business, what risks they are prepared to accept (e.g nuclear/dirty bomb) and budget accordingly

[pkh]

If we had one backup server with one license to BackupExec, would that be enough to perform these backups over network shares?

No.  You would need 1 full BE licence for the media server which can be one of the file servers and 1 remote agent licence for each of the other file servers.