Backup solution for 10TB of data and 3 servers

I am looking for a backup solution for this scenario:

• 3 servers (One Linux mail server, 2 Windows Servers)
• ~ 10TB of data
• 2 TB of which are in daily use
• a few GB of activity/change per day
• ability to restore data from any point in time
• backing up is performed on a live system (international office)
• A MSSQL database needs backing up as well
• There is no sufficient network connection to back data up off-site
• Uncomplicated access (native file system) to the secured data.

At the moment the backing up of data is handled by carrying out the delta on portable disks to an off-site location. But the software is not completely reliable (something home cooked).

We pondered whether to purchase a tape library solution from Dell, but are not very convinced that tapes are the way to go for this relatively small amout of data.

How would you set up this kind of data backup? What software would you recommend?

Carrying disks with the delta to an off-site server to a mirror server is an option. What kind of hardware would you use?

Solution 1:

What i would recommend for an on-site solution to start off with is to invest in a a backup server that has a good amount of room for expansion.

I was recently looking into the possibly deploying a tape drive solution with HP tape drivers and i was very turned off by the low amount of storage per tape, high price and the fact if i need to upgrade it i might as well throw the old tape drive out the window.

One thing you might want to look at is Drobo pro, if you load one of them up with 2tb drives you can get 16tb. I have been looking to give one of these a go ( When i get the funds :) ) but i have herd great reviews about them and the fact that a few years down the track you need to upgrade you just take a few drives out and put in some new hard drive that has yet more ridiculous amounts of space.

Solution 2:

You will probably be best off if you invest in a proven solution.

Tapes are definitely not the way to go, for your size a disk based solution would be better and much easier to maintain.

When you are on the TB scale, you should consider using something with compression and deduplication. In a solution like this you will only store unique data that is common on several copmuters ,and have references to these unique files or blocks.

You should also make sure that whatever your backup server starts with, the product supports expandable storage. So you can start with 10TB, and add on more disks as you go.

With several computers an agentless backup client would also be favorable. So that you can backup your whole LAN from a single backup client. Some products also include a virtual computer based on an FTP/SFTP/FTPS location. So you could have your backup client on windows and backup all the LAN machines + the linux machine from the same interface.

I wouldn't use an approach based on either of 1) Incremental backups and 2) differential backups. With incremental backups, you will want to do another full backup eventually, or at restore time you'll have to restore too many backups. With differential backups, you will want to do another full backup eventually, or eventually your differential backup will get too big. In your case you would have to re-send the 10TB. That is not acceptable.

Make sure when you seed the data to your backup server, that the data will NEVER need a new re-transfer if it is not changed.

Make sure that you don't NEED to restore full backups, and that you can restore only a subset of what you backed up and that you can select from backups as they were on the day you are restoring from.

Backing up data should be allowed from offsite locations, and even if the backup client is offline. In the case that they are offline there should be a 'large initial backup' option for later importing at the server.

Be sure to chose a solution that has built in MS SQL backups and exchange backups, and that you don't need to re-transfer everything each time you back them up. It should support hot backups of these items.

An example of a product at this scale that supports all of the above is ROBOBAK. (I also work for this company)