Reducing Incremental backup size for offsite disk to disk

[Weacey]

Hi All,

We are virtualising our environment this year. One thing we would like to do as part of this is backup our data over a 10MB MPLS line to our DR site 10 miles away. Our daily incremental backups are currently around 50-80GB and we are worried the backup window wont be long enough to accommodate that much traffic. Does anyone know of any software products that are good for deduplication and/or could manage the offsite replication?

Thanks.

 

[cajuntank]

Well at 80GB of data and 10Mb/s circuit speed, you would be well to worry about the backup window. If I calculate that correctly, it would take you around 20 hours to backup that much data across the wire. I use a product from AppAssure.com called Replay. I have been very happy with the product and it supports doing multiple snapshots of data changes (also known as recovery points from that software's perspective) a day and also does deduplication.

So for example, I use the snapshots to get delta changes on data for my Exchange and SQL servers every hour, every 30 minutes on my main file server, and every couple of hours on my other file and application servers. I replicate those delta changes at night and weekends (times that I specify) over to my DR site.

It does backup and replication for both Hyper-V and VMWare and all of the agent support you would expect for Exchange, SQL, and Sharepoint if needed. It also has the ability to export any recovery point to a virtual machine file to easily mount on a host server along with several other nifty features. Give them a call and schedule an online demo of their product and see if maybe its a good fit for you.

Hope that helps.

 

[LeeMason]

You could investigate some sort of WAN application optimisation. Have a look at either Riverbed or Replify. If you are going to use VMware Replify would be good as it runs as a virtual machine. Both systems will optimise the traffic across the WAN and can give 80% to 90% performance improvement (even for backups) or file replication.


Lee Mason
Optimal Projects Ltd

http://www.opl.co.uk

http://www.backupsanywhere.com