Suggestions for Across-the-WAN Backup Solutions Needed

Slowhand

Now that I've got my new job, I've been tasked with overhauling the backup infrastructure for my organization. From an IT standpoint, there is one main office where the IT staff and the main servers reside, and four branch offices that each have their own local server for things like local application and print serving. The issue is that all of these locations need to be backed up, and this whole "one tape for each server, then drive around to pick them up" business just isn't lighting my fire.

So, I'm planning on rolling out a new backup strategy involving online backups and imaging. The first step would be to deploy a NAS device at the central office, and one at another office for redundant offsite backups, in case we should have a fire at our office, or something. To the local storage, we'll be imaging servers with either Symantec Ghost or Acronis True Image. The tricky part, though, will be finding a reliable online backup solution that's going to allow us to back up the branch-office servers, as well as the local servers, to both local and remote storage. Something like Asigra seems to be the best bet, since they don't require us to use their online service, the way that Iron Mountain does, for example. Basically, we need something that'll compress data for backing up across the wire that we can manage ourselves.

So, I'm looking for two recommendations:
- Online backup solutions, as alternatives to Asigra, with a brief overview of features and pricing.
- Alternatives to Buffalo TeraStations as our NAS devices of choice. I chose Buffalo simply because it's a brand I've used before. Any and all suggestions of other devices, (and why you recommend them,) will be welcome.

RTmarc

Check out Ahsay.

http://www.ahsay.com/

doom969

There's also Vembu'S StoreGrid
http://www.vembu.com/

and Asigra
http://www.asigra.com/

Slowhand

Thanks for the suggestions, it looks like Storegrid's going to be the better choice. At least, until something else is suggested. We do need to back up a couple of Linux boxes and a Mac server as well, (right now, they're just doing plain ol' rsync backups to one of the Windows Servers' hard drives, which isn't exactly the ideal solution).

doom969 wrote:

and Asigra
http://www.asigra.com/

Thanks for the suggestion, but Asigra's what I'm trying to find an alternative to.

doom969

Sorry about that.
I was in a hurry and dint read the complete post.
Please forgive me

paintb4707

I believe the IBM Tivoli client would handle the job.

My favorite is www.globaldatavault.com, which essentially uses the ahsay client I believe and very cheap pricing.

I highly suggest that you do not store your own off-site backups. More importantly, having two central locations for backups would not be necessary at all. If you want my honest opinion, I think you should upload all your backups to one central office (if you really need to), then just bite the costs and have the backups from there uploaded to a redundant data center. That way you absolutely know you are safe. Most of those online backup providers have SEVERAL hot sites across the country. Not to mention each and every one of them are (without going into much detail) enterprise-class and would be much more reliable versus one of your branch offices.

I would also suggest that you don't upload images online. It would run all night up through the next day. If you do, you would have to use maximum compression and in return equally taking more time and resources to complete the backup archive. I'd suggest having a backup server at each site for the images. I don't have any experience with NAS boxes at all so don't quote me when I say this, but I'd assume it would have to be a standard file-server to host the Acronis Backup Server software. Get an external drive for it and create two simple batch files to copy and delete old backups to the external drive in case the backup server is ever unbootable. Then upload the bare minimum (file-level) online and to your remote sites. This will save time, money, and bandwidth.

And although I'm not completely happy with them, I use Acronis myself and hear from most people that it is a much better alternative to Symantec Ghost.

Slowhand

paintb4707 wrote:

I believe the IBM Tivoli client would handle the job.

My favorite is www.globaldatavault.com, which essentially uses the ahsay client I believe and very cheap pricing.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into IBM's Tivoli.

paintb4707 wrote:

I highly suggest that you do not store your own off-site backups. More importantly, having two central locations for backups would not be necessary at all. If you want my honest opinion, I think you should upload all your backups to one central office (if you really need to), then just bite the costs and have the backups from there uploaded to a redundant data center. That way you absolutely know you are safe. Most of those online backup providers have SEVERAL hot sites across the country. Not to mention each and every one of them are (without going into much detail) enterprise-class and would be much more reliable versus one of your branch offices.

Normally, I'd agree with you, but having worked for a datacenter that specialized in handling high-security and high-availability data, I'm not too impressed with the backup system used even by service provider-level backups. The requirements for our backups is only that we have the data in more than one location. Propagating data out to several datacenters isn't necessary, nor does the company want to spend the money on it. We're realistically more concerned with a fire wiping out one of our offices, and being able to pull the data from another storage location, (that would be anywhere from ten to fifty miles away). The ideal solution would be to have a backup server in our IT office, (which doubles as a mini-datacenter for the majority of the servers,) that pulls data from all the servers in all the branches and stores them on a NAS on the LAN. Most online backup systems have some kind of replication feature, which would push the data to another server in case the primary fails. This, incidentally, is practically identical to the system we had at the datacenter where I worked, except for the storage method.

paintb4707 wrote:

I would also suggest that you don't upload images online. It would run all night up through the next day. If you do, you would have to use maximum compression and in return equally taking more time and resources to complete the backup archive. I'd suggest having a backup server at each site for the images. I don't have any experience with NAS boxes at all so don't quote me when I say this, but I'd assume it would have to be a standard file-server to host the Acronis Backup Server software. Get an external drive for it and create two simple batch files to copy and delete old backups to the external drive in case the backup server is ever unbootable. Then upload the bare minimum (file-level) online and to your remote sites. This will save time, money, and bandwidth.

Imaging will be handled locally, with images saved to the NAS. It's not as essential as backing up the data, more of a "convenience" over having to reload software if a server should crash. I had no intention of pulling images across the wire, just data-backups.

paintb4707 wrote:

And although I'm not completely happy with them, I use Acronis myself and hear from most people that it is a much better alternative to Symantec Ghost.

Acronis and Ghost are going to be the only two we really want to choose from, it's all going to depend on which one of the two companies gives a better discount to non-profits.

paintb4707

Slowhand wrote:

The requirements for our backups is only that we have the data in more than one location. Propagating data out to several datacenters isn't necessary, nor does the company want to spend the money on it. We're realistically more concerned with a fire wiping out one of our offices, and being able to pull the data from another storage location, (that would be anywhere from ten to fifty miles away).

You misunderstood me. What I meant was, online backup providers have several hot sites in case one of THEIR sites burns down or gets stepped on by the incredible hulk. I wasn't suggesting at all that you do online backups to several datacenters. I just think that it would be a much better solution than having a second branch office centrally storing backups.

Slowhand

paintb4707 wrote:

Slowhand wrote:

The requirements for our backups is only that we have the data in more than one location. Propagating data out to several datacenters isn't necessary, nor does the company want to spend the money on it. We're realistically more concerned with a fire wiping out one of our offices, and being able to pull the data from another storage location, (that would be anywhere from ten to fifty miles away).

You misunderstood me. What I meant was, online backup providers have several hot sites, in case one of THEIR sites burns down or gets stepped on by the incredible hulk. I wasn't suggesting at all that you do online backups to several datacenters.

Fair enough, but having a provider use backups for their backups is still more money than our company wants to spend. In this case, the security needs are such that we can warrant storing the data ourselves, as they've done with the tapes up until now, it just needs to be stored redundantly so that we don't lose everything in case the mean, green Dr. Banner decides to stomp on through.