USB HDD as Enterprise Secondary Backup Solution?

B

Baredor

Gawd
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I do IT Ops for a medium sized business. We have a NAS that is Windows 2000 Powered with about 325ish GB of data. We use a LTO drive to do nightly backups of said NAS with NTbackup (hey, it works - mostly). Lately, problems have been occuring with the tape drive and scsi controllers. We believe to have them largely solved now, but we want to look at installing a secondary backup solution in case there is ever something that prevents the tape backup from working.

I am thinking about proposing we buy a quality 4-500GB USB HDD. We then conduct nightly tape backups as usual, and also set our backup utility to do a scheduled weekly backup to this USB HDD. And if we are unable to backup to tape for any reason, there's always the drive to do an emergency backup to.

Does this sound like a plan or is this complete idiocy for some reason I can't see? If it sounds good, can anyone recommend a good external drive? Remember this is enterprise stuff here, show me quality and reliability. :D
 
As long as you turn off the drives when they're not in use, you'll be fine. Most enclosures spin the disks indefinitely, without any sort of spin down time.
 
Also make sure the external enclosure has airflow in it if the drives are 7200rpm (which most are now).

I was given a SimpleTech 250Gb external drive to use at work...lasted a whole 6 months, and most of that time the drive was turned off. The external casing it came in has NO ventilation and isn't much bigger than the hdd itself, so it basically cooked itself in that short period of time. Of course, it has a warranty through SimpleTech...however I can't get it covered under warranty b/c I'm not the one who purchased it and the one who did doesn't have proof of purchase to validate the warranty. So now I have a nice external drive case that supports USB2 and Firewire...and with a little modding I'd prolly be safe to add another nice drive in it.

but for your original question...sure an external drive or set of them would be fine. Not the ideal solution for the enterprise, but will work.

Where I'm at, they use a combination of an automated HP Tape Library (you know...the ones with the robotic arm with a scanner and eye that automatically choses which tape to pull and catalogs everything for you) and standalone storage servers with up to 2Tb (that's the largest one I know of....although I'm sure we have some bigger since I've had to be involved) configured in raid.

Our local 1Tb server was moved to a Datacenter about 1.5 years ago after our building was upgraded to Gigabit lan and 5 DS3's were installed.
 
nst6563 said:
Also make sure the external enclosure has airflow in it if the drives are 7200rpm (which most are now).

I was given a SimpleTech 250Gb external drive to use at work...lasted a whole 6 months, and most of that time the drive was turned off. The external casing it came in has NO ventilation and isn't much bigger than the hdd itself, so it basically cooked itself in that short period of time.
Click to expand...

We have a similar drive we use just for transfering files/doing a quick ghost image and such. I was considering something similar to this Seagate or this WD, but active cooling is something that would be a major plus. It stays 68* in the room but it is somewhat warmer in the rack where this would have to sit.

Also, the spin down function might be a deal breaker, but I was under the impression this kind of premanufactured external drives went into a powersave/sleep mode when not in use. We don't want it spinning all the time but we really don't want to have to make the 300 yard walk over to the room whenever we want to use it either. :p

More research is definitely needed on my part, but if anyone else has input/suggestions they're more than welcome.
 
The other thing I would stay away from is the "one button backup" software - especially on a server, - at least without sufficient testing. It may be ideal for home use, but the last thing you want is to introduce an unknown/untested software into your server environment. From your post it doesn't look like you'd be using it anyway, but I'd be sure that the drive doesn't try to "auto-install" the software when you plug it in.

That WD drive looks like it has "ok" ventilation. At least there are slits in the casing.

The other avenue you could look at if going the way of an external usb/firewire drive is to get the casing seperate from the drive. This way you can chose a case with decent ventilation and add the drive of choice to it. Not often cheaper, but custom.

Every external drive I've ever had never spun down. As long as there's sufficient ventilation for the drive's heat to escape, there really shouldn't be a problem.
 
nst6563 said:
The other thing I would stay away from is the "one button backup" software - especially on a server, - at least without sufficient testing. It may be ideal for home use, but the last thing you want is to introduce an unknown/untested software into your server environment. From your post it doesn't look like you'd be using it anyway, but I'd be sure that the drive doesn't try to "auto-install" the software when you plug it in.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, whatever software they have would absolutely never see the light of day with us. I just want the storage space. :)

I don't know if anyone makes something to the point of an external enclosure that has more than one bay in it, allowing you to install 2 or 3 disks and then either RAID 5 or mirror them... but then I'm really probably overcomplicating and actually making things less reliable instead of more. Oh well, my googling continues!
 
I've got one of these stuffed with 4x300GB as a secondary backup device. I just use them as 4 separate drives but I guess you could software RAID them if you wanted to. This is for my home secondary backup solution though, not an enterprise solution.
 
If you're going to go with a Raid setup, go hardware raid. Faster and more reliable (albeit magnitudes more expensive depending on the setup -but then again...what's the data worth to tehm they're wanting backed up??? ;) ). Not sure of any USB based hardware raid solutions though.

Just making sure on that backup software though...I know a guy locally that did that to a Server 2003 box and fubarred it all. He spent the next 3 days straight re-building it and splitting the tasks between 3 servers. The one he crashed was a database server, fileserver, exchange server, internal web server and print server. I think he learned his lesson :p
 
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