Storage for Backup Target Server

M

marley1

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jul 18, 2000
Messages
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Hey everyone,

I'm looking at bringing some of my clients backups internally using Storagecraft.

I have some older (4-5 year) Dell Tower Servers (T310 & 410) models as well as spare licenses of Windows Server versions.

I need a way to have some direct attached or network storage that can grow with backup size. I have a bunch of 1TB consumer drives as well as 500GB. So something that could show me to mix and match drives would be ideal.

What options do I have?
 
No input? Was hoping someone could guide me in the correct direction
 
What kind of guarantee do you plan to offer your clients?

What happens if your house goes up in a fire?
 
Yea, you need to remember that backups are important. It's not just some afterthought like "hey, I've got some old not-yet-dead drives that I can pool in an old impossible-to-get-spare-parts-for server! Lets play backup service provider!"

Your customers will probably expect you to have at least two copies of their backup data on two different locations, possibly even two different mediums (disk, tape, optical media) and a way to manage all of this.

More info is needed on the scope of your project. Is this just some relatively unimportant data? Will you have to pay up if the data isn't available when the customer needs it? What are the performance requirements? People always forget that storage for backup needs to meet certain performance requirements. The slower your backup environment is, the longer it takes to get your application up and running in the event of failure.
 
The data is going to be stored locally at the client and backed up locally. Replicated back to or office and stored.

Equipment I have is still under warranty. I just need a way to add storage and easily grow it. I'm use to local storage on dell raid cards. I need something more flexible of growth.
 
local storage works fine. just need server like a Dell 720xd or something with expansion room. from local storage look at a DAS, then if needed a NAS and LAST , very LAST usually, a SAN if you ever grow that big...
 
What should I look for in DAS that can be expanded? I haven't got into that area before.

The servers I have only have 4 drive bays.
 
IMHO you're trying to use the wrong tools for the job just because you have them on hand. Disaster recovery level backups are simply too important to trust to what one has sitting around, regardless of whether the gear is still in warranty or not.

I run an IT consulting firm focused on local businesses that have servers. We do offsite backups for our clients using our own servers. We're on our second generation systems now, and we did a lot of research and testing before finalizing their configuration. While our requirements might not be your requirements you might want to consider something more along these lines:

The servers are Supermicro 4U units with Xeon E5 2620 processors. They hold up to 36 hot swap drives plus 4 internal drives for the OS; the OS is on a hardware RAID 1 array with two dedicated hot spares. The customer data is on a mixture of RAID 1 and RAID 10 arrays. The drives are all 4TB 7200RPM Hitachi or HGST units and each array has drives from separate lots. Multiple arrays also allow us to buy drives as the need grows, spreading out our costs over time and also adding lot diversity to the arrays.

We keep our servers in a colocation facility in a dedicated cabinet. The colo has all the usual power feed redundancy and backup; in addition to that we have our own UPSes in the cabinet with 1 hour of runtime. It's well worth the cost and in fact it's actually less cost than having a 100 mbps fiber connection to our office and larger UPSes. The security at the datacenter is also superior to what we could reasonably achieve at our office.

I don't see us ever growing large enough that a SAN or NAS would be a good approach. Keeping things contained to one piece of hardware has worked out well for us and the approach scales nicely for any amount of data we're ever likely to store.

You can build up the infrastructure over time to spread out your costs. It will cost less to do it right in the first place than go back and do it over.
 
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I unstand all those risks.

I'm really interested in how to do DAS. I assume I need a card and some external housing.

Can someone recommend those?
 
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