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.
