What back up options are you using for your NAS/SAN?

I had Netapp come by the other day and show me some info on their 3000 series filers. Their snapshot and cloningtech coupled with price would make it so I could have a few trays / heads in something like a Raid 1 config with about 35TB. The problem is, this leaves nothing off site.

This got me looking into way to back up 35TB+ (nearline, tape, other sites, add't storage, etc.) and made me curious about how TE folks are backing up their SANs/NAS'. Anyone?

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higherho

onesaint wrote: »

I had Netapp come by the other day and show me some info on their 3000 series filers. Their snapshot and cloningtech coupled with price would make it so I could have a few trays / heads in something like a Raid 1 config with about 35TB. The problem is, this leaves nothing off site.

This got me looking into way to back up 35TB+ (nearline, tape, other sites, add't storage, etc.) and made me curious about how TE folks are backing up their SANs/NAS'. Anyone?

I have a 20 TB SAN and for my off site backups I'm forced to use External 1 TB HDD's ( I have four) . I use Symantec backup exec 2011 to take a snap shot of all my volumes and then tell it to compress it (high) and use AES encryption (with a 16 character pwd). I can compress a 1TB volume to 100 GIG. So every friday a job executes and does this for me over the weekend. On Monday I verify everything is backed up correctly and then send it to our off site location.

The other option is to purchase a redundant SAN. However, I could not persuade management to spend another 25K for a backup solution so we worked with what we got.

netsysllc

Much less than $25K with more space Backblaze Blog » Petabytes on a Budget v2.0:Revealing More Secrets

onesaint

@higherho, That's some crazy compression. You've done restores from that and they come out ok?

We use Netbackup for tape, but I don't think I would want to put anywhere near that sort of compression on tape.

@netsysllc Yeah, those chassis are pretty cool. Though, the price is pre-flood. Also, I think those are based on software RAID.

There are some nice Supermicro chassis that would work too. Roll your own like that requires a good deal of support though.

Supermicro option: Supermicro | Products | Chassis | 4U | SC847E16-R1400UB

higherho

onesaint wrote: »

@higherho, That's some crazy compression. You've done restores from that and they come out ok?

I only had two failed on me. Though I blame myself for this because there is an option to check in Symantec to verify your backup to see if everything works and I forgot to on the one server. So over 95% of the time they worked for me very well.

We use Netbackup for tape, but I don't think I would want to put anywhere near that sort of compression on tape.

I used to use Netbackup on a previous team, I hated tapes / backups but right now its the only thing that can get such high volumes of data off (unless your go the HDD route ).

I just moved over to a Dell Compellent SAN and their's alot of options that I still have check out (virtualization part is really neat). Next week though I have to create volume clusters and have that redundant / backed up.

onesaint

That's a pretty fantastic failure rate for Backup exec. I'll dig into it a bit, thanks.

Yup, NBU is for the birds. I've ended up writing scripts for it's shortcomings (tape deletion, job reporting, etc.). Also, the whole proprietary long term backup doesn't sit well with me. We still are running projects off to tape, but are just using tar with a single Quantum LTO4 drive to ensure maximum comparability in 5+ years.

Dell is the new guy on the scene from what I've read, but yeah, their offerings seem very feature rich. I'd be qurious to konw how you like them after dealing with it.

it_consultant

onesaint wrote: »

I had Netapp come by the other day and show me some info on their 3000 series filers. Their snapshot and cloningtech coupled with price would make it so I could have a few trays / heads in something like a Raid 1 config with about 35TB. The problem is, this leaves nothing off site.

This got me looking into way to back up 35TB+ (nearline, tape, other sites, add't storage, etc.) and made me curious about how TE folks are backing up their SANs/NAS'. Anyone?

We have 2 Hitachi SANs and 2 Hitachi high performance NAS devices. The NAS devices run 'true sync' which clones the volumes back and forth. We haven't implemented this technology on the SANs yet because we are baking off Commvault and Symantec. We will probably utilize Hitachi's SAN snap feature at some point as well. Either way it will be a SAN to offsite SAN type of backup.

onesaint

Nice setup it_consultant. What were you doing with the commvault / Symantec previously? Is your second site in use, an additional office or a DR hot site?

Tackle

Deduplication ftw.

vCole

Well, since I work at the aforementioned vendor - we just use SnapMirror to another location, but also tapes as well.

onesaint

Sweet, like having an in house rep.

Tape is your long term solution then? What sort of software are you using with your library and how much data are you putting on tape?

Mstavridis

Build a FreeNAS box

it_consultant

onesaint wrote: »

Nice setup it_consultant. What were you doing with the commvault / Symantec previously? Is your second site in use, an additional office or a DR hot site?

We currently have a legacy backup application called bakbone which is embarrassingly bad. Commvault is OEM'd by Hitachi to do SAN backups, it can move the data around on the FC side, making it 8x faster than running it over ethernet. Symantec has the same feature but so far it has been hard for us to set up.

Our second site is slated to be a DR location, we are moving to virtualization (Hyper-V) which will make it much more practical. We are a little unusual because we own the single mode fiber that goes out to the site so we don't worry too much about compression.

vCole

onesaint wrote: »

Sweet, like having an in house rep.

Tape is your long term solution then? What sort of software are you using with your library and how much data are you putting on tape?

About ~20TB of data, and we're using Veritas NetBackup. But this is just for this one site, which is the largest of the smallest sites.

onesaint

@vCole & @it_consultant: thanks for the info. It looks like my options are much the same as what I have in place now, just bigger.

@Mstavridis: While I am building out a ZFS freenas setup at home, rolling my own in order to back up a 35TB SAN might not be the best usage of the freenas OS. It's essentially a BSD kernel with a software raid much like the POD listed above. If I were to go that route I would want to check out some of the other network / clustered FS' before settling, eg., gluster, luster, etc.

Coolhandluke

Backup ? whats that ?
only joking !

We use direct attach storage and backup to our SAN (in different building).
Mostly Backup exec. For some of the 2008 servers as file servers - Windows Backup.

Akaricloud

We're currently replicating through our Nimble SANs to another pair in one of our branch offices. Additionally I just set up Appassure(Dell's recent acquisition) for quick restores of individual servers and files.

We're also looking into off-site tape backups through Appassure(as soon as they finish up with this feature).

N2IT

Last enterprise I worked in used EVault for backups and some of the legacy mid ranges used tape.

Saint I am not sure of the hardware that was physically storing the data.

onesaint

@Coolhandluke, @Akaricloud: Thanks for the input. It sounds like duplication to a second, offsite SAN is pretty common.

@N2: Thanks for the input and no worries. Mostly, I'm just curious what folks are doing with 20+ TB of data off their NAS/SANs and how they are keeping that data safe. Taking 10TB to LTO5 means some 4 tapes per job (at 45$ a tape) and if that's on a weekly, incremental, and monthly basis those tapes start to add up. Granted that beats the cost of 5 days downtime!

N2IT

True enough, but thanks for sharing the financials. That puts the situation in perspective.