SAN disk space is too expensive to store backups?

With no other info to go on, would you agree with the statement that SAN disks are too expensive to use for backups (Veeam VM’s in this case) and that a cheaper medium should be used (a la DLT or direct attached storage) or that disk space, even SAN disk, is cheap enough these days that keeping backup on SAN is ok?

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Akaricloud

Not all SAN devices are created or priced equal. I typically used our slower, older SAN devices for this type of backup instead of getting rid of them. Would I buy a new, top of the line device to store these? -Probably not, but it also depends on budget and availability requirements.

Deathmage

We use Veeam backups but on relatively cheap ($600 to $1200) dual giga nic QNAP NAS's that have RAID 5, 6 and some 10 configurations. they are way more cost effective. But a SAN is the proven choice if the money is there. But it's not always the viable solution.

darkerosxx

The difference in your scenario holding all else equal between SAN and DAT is the network, so if the cost difference is the network and your network costs are the same (again in this all other things being equal scenario), then I would use SAN for the management bonus provided by a centralized storage platform.

If this isn't the answer you're looking for, please reword your question.

I think you are trying to compare disks used for SAN vs disks used for DAT and my question would be why can't you use the same disks for both applications?

Unless by SAN you actually mean an appliance like a Netapp, which is a completely different question.

langenoir

The situation is we have two IBM DS 3500 SANs. We were just bought by a big company so they don’t want to put any money into the datacenter and instead want us to transition to their public cloud environment. Well that’s not going to be complete for at least another year and my boss is being a worrywart about disk space.

My solution SAN1 has 300 GB 10k SAS drives and is full up. SAN2 has 900 GB 10K SAS and has 5 slots left with about 7 hot spares. I told him that we should just convert 3 of the hot spares on SAN2 to a RAID5 and more the data from 2 LUNs on SAN1 to SAN2. That will free up 8 slots on SAN2. Then we get 2x 2TB SATA disks, run them in a RAID1, move the backup data there and voilà, we have 2.4ish TB of freed up 10k SAS space.

The shelf is very flexible and can accept many different disk types. These 900 GB 10k SAS drives aren’t expensive, $450. Our new company is huge like Fortune 50 so they can afford it, I just think my boss is being cheap because of the new owner.

Well, he wants to just try and move the backup to local storage on this rack server, which is kind of annoying because it’s a pain in the ass to move the backups and this is an ESXi host so not really what it’s for IMHO. This is the kind of thing I’d expect out of an SMB, not an enterprise.

I like to keep all the storage together, centralized to manage it better. I don’t see buying HDD as a large hardware expense. It’s like buying RAM, sometimes you just gotta do it.

I'm just trying to figure out if I'm being too progressive or if they're just being to cheap.

langenoir

Deathmage wrote: »

We use Veeam backups but on relatively cheap ($600 to $1200) dual giga nic QNAP NAS's that have RAID 5, 6 and some 10 configurations. they are way more cost effective. But a SAN is the proven choice if the money is there. But it's not always the viable solution.

I tried to get them to move to a cheap NAS about 6 months ago for this, but the old boss just said it wasn't that important and to keep it on the SAN.

UnixGuy

Tape drives are reliable enough, and much cheaper! Try LTO6

volume

You're asking the wrong question. The real question to ask is, What are the business requirements? Once you have that answer, you can select an appropriate solution for the business.