Backup Storage Device Ideas

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USF-Nealio

Limp Gawd
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Jan 18, 2012
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The office that I work for is very quickly running out of storage space for there backups, and I'm looking for some alternatives. Currently we employ backup exec to backup our servers and data to a rack-mount Netgear ReadyNAS that is kept onsite. I have rack-space and a 50mb pipe to a co-located data center, and would like to synchronize the backups between devices at each site.


Requirements:
  • Minimum 16TB+ storage with room for growth (whether it be clustering, expansion shelves, etc.).
  • Storage redundancy (whether it be RAID, or some other form of duplication.)
  • A fair amount of Compression/Deduplication (we want to store a large number of backups, saving space on duplicates will be crucial).
  • Snapshot schedule.
  • Real-Time Replication.
  • Service Agreement (Company policy requires that there is vendor support available for all hardware.)

What does everyone use? What would you recommend?
 
Windows Server 2012 R2 would work fairly well and allow for Hyper-V and deduplication.

It supports clustering and you could sync two of them together if you wanted an additional level of backup.

I would do 8 3TB Red drives in Raid 6 on both servers in the cluster. That would give you 18TB on both servers(36TB combined) and the ability to have 2 drives fail on both without loosing the array.
 
Priller said:
Windows Server 2012 R2 would work fairly well and allow for Hyper-V and deduplication.

It supports clustering and you could sync two of them together if you wanted an additional level of backup.

I would do 8 3TB Red drives in Raid 6 on both servers in the cluster. That would give you 18TB on both servers(36TB combined) and the ability to have 2 drives fail on both without loosing the array.
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I had considered 2012 R2, but I was vague on the real-time replication aspect of it. Does it work well over WAN?
 
USF-Nealio said:
I had considered 2012 R2, but I was vague on the real-time replication aspect of it. Does it work well over WAN?
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If the connection is decent then it shouldn't be an issue and it does snapshots etc.

One thing is R2 is not plug an play and require set up of services for what you are trying to do. I would suggest you look at online videos to see if it is something you want to work with.

I personally use 2012 R2 as my home server and it works very well. You can even set up remote access, FTP, and the list just goes on.
 
Do you have a budget already, or are you trying to put together options with associated costs?
 
arentol said:
Do you have a budget already, or are you trying to put together options with associated costs?
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I'm trying to get options with associated costs. If I can find a satisfactory pair of devices and OS/Software (if needed) below $12K total, I'm sure it would get approved without a second thought. But if there were show need or usefulness, I could potentially get away with up to $20K for the pair. For instance, our DR site does not currently have an iSCSI host, if the devices support iSCSI, the extra feature could be put to use in a pinch, and I could sell them on the added value for the device. Bonus points if the device is using 4TB disks, as it'll definitely give us room to grow in the future.

I've started looking at the SAM-SD option that is all over SpiceWorks. I can build out a pair of DL180 G6's with 2x 6-core Xeons, 96GB of RAM, and 12x 4TB, for just around my $12K soft limit. The trick is what OS to use. FreeNAS is the closest thing I can find to a commercial ZFS distro I've been able to find.
 
If all you're looking for are a couple of servers to store backup's you really don't need that much power imo. At work we run an OmniOS box with an i3 processor/16GB ECC RAM/48TB in it to take care of storing the backups. We built it all in for about 6K (CAD) with drives.
 
How do you like your OmniOS box? Do you use and Replication or Compression/Deduplication?

From my experience, Deduplication/compression utilizes a lot of CPU and RAM, so I would be very surprised if an i3 kept up.

I had red that up to 5GB of RAM is needed per 1TB of data stored, and Oracle states the following in regards to CPU:

ZFS deduplication is synchronous. ZFS assumes a highly multithreaded operating system (Solaris) and a hardware environment in which CPU cycles (GHz times cores times sockets) are proliferating much faster than I/O. This has been the general trend for the last twenty years, and the underlying physics suggests that it will continue.
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We don't use deduplication due to the extreme memory requirements. As for compression because backupexec is compressing the files as it is. We don't we don't currently do offsite replication but it will be coming in the near future.

I have however done replication across two similar boxes on a client site and had no issues saturating gigabit during the replication. Since you're only on a 50mbit connection, I wouldn't be overly concerned with it not being able to keep up.

Also, I may have jumped the gun on replying to your thread. I missed the part that you required dedup and compression.
 
spankit said:
We don't use deduplication due to the extreme memory requirements. As for compression because backupexec is compressing the files as it is. We don't we don't currently do offsite replication but it will be coming in the near future.

I have however done replication across two similar boxes on a client site and had no issues saturating gigabit during the replication. Since you're only on a 50mbit connection, I wouldn't be overly concerned with it not being able to keep up.

Also, I may have jumped the gun on replying to your thread. I missed the part that you required dedup and compression.
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No worries, I appreciate your input on the subject, and you made very good points on the subect. Thank you.
 
USF-Nealio said:
Sounds pretty cool. Do you have any idea on price for one of those units?
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Not too sure, they have different models.
HA2100 may cost around $16,000 with 22TB raw (17TB usable) with HA setup. This is before dedup and compression.
 
with your stated budget, maybe LTO-5 or LTO-6 tape drive + tape media ?

Per the current tech trend, two-layer option is possible, RAID-5 4x2TB Disk for immediate disk backup location, then transfer them onto LTO-5/6 tape media at later stage.

Tape media where normal simple storage operational method is fairly straightforward. tape media cost is within budget so you can get multiple for redundancy purpose. LTO-5 is 1.5TB native and LTO-6 is 2.5TB native.
 
lightp2 said:
with your stated budget, maybe LTO-5 or LTO-6 tape drive + tape media ?

Per the current tech trend, two-layer option is possible, RAID-5 4x2TB Disk for immediate disk backup location, then transfer them onto LTO-5/6 tape media at later stage.

Tape media where normal simple storage operational method is fairly straightforward. tape media cost is within budget so you can get multiple for redundancy purpose. LTO-5 is 1.5TB native and LTO-6 is 2.5TB native.
Click to expand...

That is definitely a viable option, and that is very likely to be the best fallback plan in the event that I am not approved for a higher budget.

I ran across the DR4100 when researching. Does anyone have any experience with the Dell DR product line? It seems to be exactly what I'm looking for.
 
Far more interesting than the Dell, is an offering from LenovoEMC. It's the PX12-450R. It's only $6K for 24TB of RAW storage, and is capable of Deduplication and replication. I'm going to try and get some more information before passing this request onto my purchasing team.
 
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