Server Back up Solution Help

pc1x1

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 1, 2008
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Hi guys, I am looking to design a back up solution for our servers, and SQL Database, and Echange Server. I was thinking and heard Acronis is ideal for this.

We have 3 physical servers, running windows 2012 standard, and each of those servers have VMs inside. We have Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and a Microsoft SQL Server running.

Ideally I just want something that backs up everything once a day, and or while data is written, but it has to be dissimilar hardware. We need the VMs backed up also, and there are databases, and data being written daily, as CRM, ERP is all there. We are using Enterprise 15k drives, and I don't and can't afford to mirror the configuration.

It's basically 1.2TB, another 1.2TB, and 2TB, that need to be backed up. Does anyone have any recommendation in what system I could build to achieve this.

Currently the servers are running Raid 5, that's our security policy, so I'd like something apart from that to be safer.

Thanks!
 
As long as you are not looking to implement a full fail-over setup you should be able to pull off a backup solution fairly easily for that configuration. The hardware portion should be easy, offline/nearline storage does not require even remotely as much power or speed as your workhorse servers. What do you have available for either SAN or inter-device links, FC, 10GbE, anything like that? You could introduce a new VM on one of the boxes and, hardware permitting, pass-through a FC or SAS card to act as direct attached storage. This new VM can easily run S2012 (i'm assuming you are using datacenter which allows many VMs under the same license) and use storage spaces to create a RAID-10 like structure formatted with ReFS over any number of consumer or nearline grade disks and present this to other devices as the backup target. This is just as easy to do on an independent box, just more costly for licensing purposes.

Software unfortunately would be the difficult part for me as I have not worked with most backup software directly. But I would definitely get behind your idea to have a backup solution in place, as no doubt someone will bring up the old adage (it may as well be me flogging this deceased equine this time 'round) "RAID is not a backup", it is only a solution to maximize server uptime.
 
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I know that some companies (as my friend`s one) use Handy Backup. The software makes backup of Microsoft Exchange, SQL and it seems other things you`ve described.))
 
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