Upgrade the Servers time! Storage/Backup Mostly

[nuclearsnake]

Hi everyone!
It's that time of the year again when we get money to upgrade some of our servers!

Below is what we currently have, and where we want to be when this is over.

Currently: 100 Users

One Windows 2003 SP2 DC at our main location, 300GB of total space, 80GB free mostly My Documents, and Department Shares. Backup is to an LTO2 Drive

Second DC, Win 2003 R2, Secondary location, 146GB total, 100GB free, backed up to the 1st DC. Used for remote user's My Documents

One Old Windows 2000 Server hosting our Creative Dev files, 360GB total space, 40GB free. Backup to a 500GB drive.

One Windows 2003 R2 Application Server. 74GB Backed up to the 1st server


Goals:

• Build a large file server to merge the Users data and the Creative Dev files together to provide us with enough space to grow over the next 3 years.
• Have a better backup solution that can scale upwards (Autoloader?)

How do most small/medium sized companies with 3 or 4 servers manage backups? A tape drive on each box is just silly... We also need to send full backups off site every week.

Comments, Suggestions? I was looking at Dell's AX150 unit along with an autoloader LTO3 drive... good, bad?

We have ~20K for this project.

 

[shade_star]

Good plan if you have to send tapes offsite.
You may want to look at the next SAN up I forget the model number as it takes snapshots during the day. This obviously takes care of the backup for the servers (if you have the servers booting from the san)