Opinions on Concept. 2

[Tony57]

We're going to be getting a new backup solution soon. One of the things I was considering was USB hard drives. I like the USB option because no extra hardware is needed. And restores can be from any PC on the network with a USB port. I have already tested this with BE-10 and it does work. Backups are about 3.4x faster too (the tape drive was the bottleneck, at about 3 meg/sec. In theory the hard drives ought to be at least 100 times faster, but I think the network is the bottleneck now.) Restores should be faster too.

Right now we have 12 tape sets, 9 tapes each. Each set holds one full backup and a month's worth of incrementals (about 600 gig total) plus two spare tapes. The tapes were $85 each for a total of $8330 in tapes. 400 gig USB hard drives are less than 500, and if we do it the same way, we would need two per month which would be $12,000, but we wouldn't have to buy a tape library. But with the hard drives I would probably change the way we do it, probably one for the full each month, two rotated every other month for incrementals, and two spares for a total of 16, or $8000. Add a padded case for each one for transporting to offsite storage, make it 8500.

What do you think?

 

[steveot]

Couple things to look at.
Your correct that a restore can be done from any pc on the network. This could be security issue or is the drives are stollen. IF its tape is less likely somebody going to have a $3000 drive laying around to restore of tape, etc.

I always stress that hard drives are hardrive - constant moving parts and always the potential for failure due to vibration/heat/etc.

With Backup to disk solution you just have to make sure the hardware and drives are right. I generally see issues with Backup Exec writing the bkf files due to OS problems or antivirus, etc. The BKF file can get corrupt occasionally.
There doesnt see any redundancy in you scenerio with the drives. If you 400gig drive went bad - your out. On you tapes if one tape went bad you have 8 other tapes to work with.

 

[Tony57]

Thanks,

Everything is locked up, the server room, as well as fireproof safes in two offsite locations.

As to wear, only the ones that are active will be running, and I've replaced a lot more tapes in my life than hard drives.

We have redundancy, sort of. In addition to the backup, we are also mirroring drives from 3 production servers to another server (seperate building) with very large drives. Everything is raid5. If any (or all 3) of the other servers crash, we can be back up in a matter of minutes with yesterday's data (and possibly a little slower, since the one server will be hit a lot more than each of the 3).

We originally did the mirror because it's a lot easier to restore yesterday's file (the overwhelming majority of restores requested are from the previous day)than from tape, but then I got the bright idea of creating all the same shares so in case of failure all I'd have to do is change a line in the logon script to point to the backup server.

As far as wear goes, I started out 3 years ago with all new tapes, and had 4 failures in that time. I think hard drives are more reliable than that, and certainly less expensive per megabyte.

 

[Zelandakh]

I'd go lto-3 autoloader. Around $4,500 to buy. Then 2 tapes per job for 12 sets is 24 tapes. Tapes are around $80 so $2,000 total.

A USB drive of 500GB will be a spanned set of drives using RAID0. I've had a couple of these and a very high failure rate.

My tape drives run at 35MB/sec so not sure why you are getting only 10% of that.

 

[Tony57]

Probably because I'm backing up remote servers across the lan (100 mbps full duplex but each server has dual nics set up as load balancing team. One server is in another building the two switches connnected by fiber). The servers are also older(>5 yrs), a Dell PE4400, a compaq DL320, and two compaq ML530 (one of these is the backup server. None over 1ghz. BE says 184 meg per minute.

The drives I was looking at are 400 gb single drives. We have a few 250s and they have never had a problem.

We were quoted ~$15k for the LTO solution, but the solution offered DID have two tape drives.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[Tony57]

to Zelandakh

Just a thought: Are we measuring the same thing? Is your tape running 35 megaBYTES per second, or 35 megaBITS per second?