Hey everyone,
I just started with a medium sized business doing IT work, and they have asked me to research types of backup solutions. At this point we are running a server that holds about 350 GB of data, and we have 2 remote offsite locations which they would also like to back up as well. The total approximate size would be around 500GB, but they'd like to start off with 1TB and have the option for expandability as well. Right now they are using tape backups, and I believe would like to get rid of that somehow, but the data would also have to be stored offsite as well somewhere, in case of some sort of disaster at the main office. In the small bit of research I've done, I think for this size of storage would a NAS device not be the best option, running Windows Storage Server 2003 or similar, and then maybe the possibility of a second NAS running offsite or at one of the other locations. If you ran both of these NAS's with RAID 1 or RAID 5, that would give you multiple data redundancy, and also offsite storage, and from the prices I've been able to find, it seems like that would be much cheaper than a similar SAN solution. If the company did go with something like a SAN device, they would most likely go with iSCSI, not Fiber Channel, just for the reduced cost. Of course a third option would be something like an automated tape loader, but if they want to get away from tape storage, that may not be the best option. Also, what kind of companies provide offsite storage services such as this? What would services like that cost?
Thanks alot for your help!
I just started with a medium sized business doing IT work, and they have asked me to research types of backup solutions. At this point we are running a server that holds about 350 GB of data, and we have 2 remote offsite locations which they would also like to back up as well. The total approximate size would be around 500GB, but they'd like to start off with 1TB and have the option for expandability as well. Right now they are using tape backups, and I believe would like to get rid of that somehow, but the data would also have to be stored offsite as well somewhere, in case of some sort of disaster at the main office. In the small bit of research I've done, I think for this size of storage would a NAS device not be the best option, running Windows Storage Server 2003 or similar, and then maybe the possibility of a second NAS running offsite or at one of the other locations. If you ran both of these NAS's with RAID 1 or RAID 5, that would give you multiple data redundancy, and also offsite storage, and from the prices I've been able to find, it seems like that would be much cheaper than a similar SAN solution. If the company did go with something like a SAN device, they would most likely go with iSCSI, not Fiber Channel, just for the reduced cost. Of course a third option would be something like an automated tape loader, but if they want to get away from tape storage, that may not be the best option. Also, what kind of companies provide offsite storage services such as this? What would services like that cost?
Thanks alot for your help!
