where do you send your offsite backups?

cyr0n_k0r

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Hey everyone, currently I own an offsite data backup service but we use disk technology .. IE, software that backs up to enterprise SAN's. Many businesses still think tape is the best option (why I dont know, but they do). Anywho, because of this I have been thinking of opening a facility here in our town (phoenix, AZ) that would store and catalog companies offsite tapes.

My question is, for the people that tape and store it offsite, where do you store yours? Do you take them to a facility like I describe above, or what other methods of storage and cataloging do you use.

Also, another important thing is what is your guy's expected turnaround time in the case you ever needed a tape from offsite? 4-hours? 1-hour?
 
We just have em stored with a company we've contracted with. In the future we'll likely go to offsite disk (possible with level3 over private fiber), but we'll still use tape for permanly monthly snapshots.

Turn around on tape requests is usually next day, though if it were an emergency I'd hope to get it in a few hours.
 
ok, you store them with a company. Do you know anything about their facility? What is their response time to get a tape back to you. Do they pick them up, or do you drop them off?
 
Nightly tape goes home with the backup admin. Quarterly archive tapes to a safe deposit box. For us, I see no reason to have half hour delivery or anything like that.
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
ok, you store them with a company. Do you know anything about their facility? What is their response time to get a tape back to you. Do they pick them up, or do you drop them off?

They pick them up. They're only an hour away.

Temperature controlled environment, halon fire suppression, limited access, etc. We switched from Iron Mountain to them (cheaper, local company).
 
Hmmm..


You backup data opn your server then send them away incase the place your servers at burns or something?


Then you call this place and have them send the data to you when needed?


I never knew people did this.
 
I'm an IT controls auditor for one of the "Big Four" public accounting firms. About 95% of all clients that I have had the opportunity to review use Iron Mountain for their offsite storage. These businesses range from medium-sized to Fortune 100 companies in all industries.

I guess it all depends on what type of businesses you're catering towards.
 
We have two offices and use tape because it's portable, reliable, durable, and easy.

On any given day, we have the previous night's backup in the on-site safe, the previous day's backup en route to the other office, and last week's backup at Iron Mountain.
 
Carp said:
Hmmm..


You backup data opn your server then send them away incase the place your servers at burns or something?


Then you call this place and have them send the data to you when needed?


I never knew people did this.

No, we back up the data and send it off twice weekly, staying out for a week at a time then coming back. They pick it up and return it regulary, although we do have a permanent offsite box with some CDs and documentation.
 
We use recall. They have a huge facility on the other side of town. We have regular pick up and dropoffs. I know their whole facility uses gas fire supression so as not to destroy the tapes with water. Their entire facility is on a desile generator so the enviormentals will run if the power goes out.

If we need an emergency delivery they get the tapes and someone drives them over. depending on traffic 30-45 mins
 
Why is there all this misconception about Tape?

What is the only line of business recovery method that is safe? Tape. Why? Because with tapes I can have the building burn down, and still recover my business data. Oh sure with disc backup I could do the same thing, but it is difficult to take a SAN or NAS offline to have it shipped offsite. Oh wait you could use Removeable drives, just don't drop them.

I can drop the tapes in a small safe, hand it off to Iron Mountain or someone else. They can't access the tapes, but if the building burns down I can get my data for recovery.

I find it difficult to do that with SANs, NASes, or removeable drives.

BTW I take my tapes off site weekly to a safety deposit box at the Bank.
 
Bigger companies can have duplicate SAN/NAS devices in two different locations, ianshot.

Jim Gray has been doing some research into disk instead of tape for backup, but I guess he hasn't published anything yet. At certain data volumes (more than a terabyte, IIRC) tape just doesn't cut it.
 
ianshot said:
Why is there all this misconception about Tape?

What is the only line of business recovery method that is safe? Tape. Why? Because with tapes I can have the building burn down, and still recover my business data. Oh sure with disc backup I could do the same thing, but it is difficult to take a SAN or NAS offline to have it shipped offsite. Oh wait you could use Removeable drives, just don't drop them.

I can drop the tapes in a small safe, hand it off to Iron Mountain or someone else. They can't access the tapes, but if the building burns down I can get my data for recovery.

I find it difficult to do that with SANs, NASes, or removeable drives.

BTW I take my tapes off site weekly to a safety deposit box at the Bank.
Yup. Tape is great.

I'm glad we're relying on tapes instead of constantly moving around and handing off hard drives. There's no way on earth they would be as reliable.

A 200GB tape is way cheaper, more reliable, and more durable than a 200GB hard drive.. not to mention the fact that the tape library will shuffle tapes, keep catalogs of every backup made, and spit the right tape out at me when I need it.
 
kumquat said:
Yup. Tape is great.

I'm glad we're relying on tapes instead of constantly moving around and handing off hard drives. There's no way on earth they would be as reliable.

A 200GB tape is way cheaper, more reliable, and more durable than a 200GB hard drive.. not to mention the fact that the tape library will shuffle tapes, keep catalogs of every backup made, and spit the right tape out at me when I need it.
Tape is great if you have a small amount of data, because if you need to backup alot of data, you are going to need huge budget to buy the tape drive and media.
Then there is all the running around, or courier services required to put your tapes somewhere else offsite, and that can get expensive or tiring :)

Where I work (a small center on a college campus), we could not afford the $1000+ for a tape drive and media for the ~500GB of data we have to backup (user data and server config files).

So I got an older computer, set it up with a ~1TB RAID5 sata array, and got it co-located with the IT services for the college (in an actual datacenter environment).

Now our main fileserver does rsync-over-ssh based incremental snapshots every night, week, month, and year to the backup server.
All of the snapshots are logged and viewable via web browser -- if errors are encountered, I get an alert via email that gives me details of what happened.

Minus the initial full data backup, bandwidth usage is quite low, and disk usage is ~675GB on the backup server after a year and a half of backups (thats leaves alot more room to grow using incremental snapshots)

And what happens when a drive dies in the backup server? oh right -- I don't lose any data because it is running RAID5 -- I promptly go and replace the drive, like a good admin, and that concludes the 'running around handing off hard drives' that I will have to do. (if two drives die, yes, then all the data is gone on the backup server -- The data would still reside on the main fileserver on another RAID5 array. If both machines die...well then I am screwed :p)

What happens when our main file server melts into a pile of goo? oh right, the backup server is also setup with FreeVRRPD and will automatically take over the role of file server when it detects the main server has dropped off the network and serve up the latest snapshot of user data in read/write.
When the new file server comes in the mail, FreeBSD gets installed, config files get restored, and after a few hours of copying files from the backup server, things are back up and running without me ever having to even log into the backup server.

Now that may have sounded a bit harsh toward tape backup -- all I Really want to point out is that the cost/GB for doing tape backups is far too high when you start talking about hundreds of GB of data. The automation, ease of use for end users (staff can restore their own files from read-only network access to the backup server), and the low cost in comparison with a tape system of equivalent capacity are what made disk-to-disk much more viable for me.
 
safety deposit box at the bank.

at a previous company we actually used a service that picked up the tapes once a week.

take the tapes to the bank myself. it is a great excuse to leave early on Friday.
 
draconius said:
So I got an older computer, set it up with a ~1TB RAID5 sata array, and got it co-located with the IT services for the college (in an actual datacenter
Free colocation is pretty damn nice.

Try to colocate a 1TB RAID-5 file server in a real colocation facility and you will find that it costs a hell of a lot more than a decent tape library and handful of 200/400 tapes.

Don't mischaracterize tape shuffling as "running around." I spend literally 3 minutes a day dropping the tape in an IM box and tossing it in the "outgoing" mail bin.

And we never have to drive or otherwise locomote over to a co-lo facility to manage broken server hardware.

There's nothing wrong with colocating a server to achieve offsite backup. Lots of places to do.. but it's not cheap, and it can easily involve more "running around" than on-site tape backups. With tapes, I never have to be more than 40 feet away from my desk for any reason relating to backups.
 
well, my company maintains 1TB+ RAIDed SANS in multiple locations that back up to each other so your data is always in 2 different locations.

I don't want to start some stupid "tape is better" argument because most of you guys are right. Maintaining that kind of equipment is expensive for each company. That is why companies like mine exist. To contract out storage and backup.

And just for good measure we burn the customers data to DVD's every month and send it to them.
 
Send them to Archive Systems (the company I work for). We take business in Phoenix from IRM and Recall on a daily basis, and for good reason. So I've got a bias!
 
ianshot said:
Why is there all this misconception about Tape?

What is the only line of business recovery method that is safe? Tape. Why? Because with tapes I can have the building burn down, and still recover my business data. Oh sure with disc backup I could do the same thing, but it is difficult to take a SAN or NAS offline to have it shipped offsite. Oh wait you could use Removeable drives, just don't drop them.

I can drop the tapes in a small safe, hand it off to Iron Mountain or someone else. They can't access the tapes, but if the building burns down I can get my data for recovery.

I find it difficult to do that with SANs, NASes, or removeable drives.

BTW I take my tapes off site weekly to a safety deposit box at the Bank.

I use tape as well, but you're forgetting about offsite storage. Private line to a storage/dr provider to replicate changes to an offsite SAN.
http://www.telcove.com/products/disaster-recovery.asp
 
kumquat said:
Free colocation is pretty damn nice.
Heh, I don't know about his college, but at mine departments pay OIT for services. So disk space on their servers (as an example) costs $3/GB/year. Colo is around $400/RU/yr. Not a bad price, not at all, but not free.

 
EmptyFlame said:
I'm an IT controls auditor for one of the "Big Four" public accounting firms. About 95% of all clients that I have had the opportunity to review use Iron Mountain for their offsite storage. These businesses range from medium-sized to Fortune 100 companies in all industries.

I guess it all depends on what type of businesses you're catering towards.

Funny that we work for the same company in the same region, yet I don't know you.

I concur that most of my client will ship it off to Iron Mountain. The more frugal ones will have a courier service that shuffles the tapes around to various other locations of the corporation on a daily basis (i.e. HQ -> Subsidiary 1 -> Subsidiary 2 -> HQ)

As far as the OP's concern on response time, this typically is defined with the SLA you have with the business- the faster they want it, the more they pay for the privilege.
 
kumquat said:
Free colocation is pretty damn nice.

Try to colocate a 1TB RAID-5 file server in a real colocation facility and you will find that it costs a hell of a lot more than a decent tape library and handful of 200/400 tapes.

Don't mischaracterize tape shuffling as "running around." I spend literally 3 minutes a day dropping the tape in an IM box and tossing it in the "outgoing" mail bin.

And we never have to drive or otherwise locomote over to a co-lo facility to manage broken server hardware.

There's nothing wrong with colocating a server to achieve offsite backup. Lots of places to do.. but it's not cheap, and it can easily involve more "running around" than on-site tape backups. With tapes, I never have to be more than 40 feet away from my desk for any reason relating to backups.
whoops, I should have mentioned that we pay for the co-location...but yea, it IS far cheaper than hosting a server in a datacenter somewhere with some big bandwidth :)
 
Currently we have multiple NAS's at multiple locations that backup each other over dark fiber. However, we have been thinking about tape, most likey when this happens, they will be taken to other locations we own.
 
WesM63 said:
Currently we have multiple NAS's at multiple locations that backup each other over dark fiber. However, we have been thinking about tape, most likey when this happens, they will be taken to other locations we own.

If you are using it then it is no longer "dark fiber".

With the companies I work for the person incharge of changing the tape everyday takes keeps one at home at least once a week.
 
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