A Backup Solution

[IdahoTech]

Hello All,

I work for a school district here in Shelley, ID and we are looking into a backup solution. We have been given a quote from Giga Trend and can I say ouch!!!

They want 23,434.00 for thier solution. Please any suggestions on backup for our setup based on your knowledge would be great. Here is what we have:

5 Novell Servers (4) Novell 6.0 SP3/ (1) 5.1
11 Mbps Wireless Lan
4 Remote Locations 3 w/Novell 6 / 1 w/5.1
Each Server with roughly (2) 20 Gig drives in them.

So not much there. How do some of you backup and what would be a good suggestion for this?They are suggesting not only a Tape backup but also a system that has 4 ATA drives (yes you heard right not SCSI, ATA 5400 drives). Does this mean they are suggesting imaging the servers? Can this be done differently and in a easy way?

I have not been involved with backup on the server side like this for quite a long time and even then it was pre setup with ARCserve and it was somewhat useable at best.

Please if you can give me pointers to go on here it would be greatly appreciated. Would a Dell Powervault be Sufficient? Or another system totaly. We think this company is trying to rake us over the coals for this. Please help I hate begging but since this area is somewhat sparse for me, any help would be great!! Thanks for any input anyone can give....


IdahoTech
'Only two things are infinite - the Universe and human Stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the Universe' Albert Einstein

http://www.sd60.k12.id.us

 

[gwichman]

I'd ask in the Novell forum what people would recommend as a backup solution. Novell can be somewhat tricky. Just looking at the number of servers and amount of data though, it doesn't seem like that much to me. Any server and a small SCSI attached AIT (4mm) library or something similar should be adequate. 4mm tapes these days can store a capacity of up to 120GB per tape. A small 6 tape loader with 1 drive will not run more then a few thousand at most. Whatever software you end up using you'll have to make sure will work with your particular remote locations layout. I've seen some companies end up just attaching tapes locally to each server due to the fact that pulling the backups across the network from their remote locations proved impractical.

 

[IdahoTech]

Thanks for the tip. I will check there also. Trying to pull over the data on our wireless lan has been a concern of ours so we may have to look into one at each site.

Thanks for getting back to me on it. Appreciate the help.

IdahoTech
'Only two things are infinite - the Universe and human Stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the Universe' Albert Einstein

http://www.sd60.k12.id.us