Offsite Providers

[hmusa]

Greetings! This is kind of an off-topic inspired by the "Best offsite backup method" thread.

Our full backup of ~20VMs creates ~650G of data. It grows nightly via (forward) Incremental by about 40G. I usually do weekly synthetic fulls, and keep just the single restore point. I copy these backup files to tape every night so we have roughly 2 weeks of history. Get the feeling I could improve on this proceedure though.

Instead of investing in LTO-4, I'd like to move to using our 10/10 WAN link to put copies of our Veeam files in the cloud. I'm assuming this would take physical seeding or 4 days of non-stop uploading. I saw this in the other Offsite thread, which means I have about a week of transfer time.

mayojs
10Mb/s circuit should deliver 4GB/hour

Who are the winners when it comes to offsite backup data providers? I think I'd like to let the archive grow to 30 days of restore point history or more, so that will be at least 2TB. My biggest concern is that I'd like the ability to get a physical drive shipped to me FedEx overnight, should disaster strike. Can't wait for 5-10 days while we download our recovery data. Here's what I've looked at so far.

Amazon AWS instance: install Veeam there, remote repository. But the last I read (6 months ago) I would have to go through their ticket/ship steps to send them a drive, they'd copy it when they got to it, and send it back via a not very fast method.

Rackspace: similar to Amazon, but I didn't see if they had a drive shipping service.

Colocate a server ~6hrs from our office, and drive and get retrieve it in case of emergency!

Colocate a server & attach a NAS to it and ask an ISP to FedEx that to me.

I get the feeling there is a best practice for my setup, and 2-3 good remote providers who can do what we would need. Maybe investing in a 20/20 WAN link would make downloading feasible in case of disaster?

Many thanks for any thoughts on how people do this, or with what provider and technique.

Tom

[dellock6]

Hi Tom,
I cannot tell you which one is better, they are all located in the US (where I think you need it) and they are not presente here in Europe. I would advise you to also check pricing on bandwidth and transfer, I've seen some customers going to AWS and beeing hit by high prices due to payment of data transfer. Maybe someone with a flat price for bandwidth is better for Veeam offsite backup.
Apart from this, a simple Win2008 VM with a big local hard disk is enough to do what you want, is correct to set ip up as a remote repository.

Luca.

[J1mbo]

Our full backup of ~20VMs creates ~650G of data. It grows nightly via (forward) Incremental by about 40G...

RackSpace are quoting 7p/GB/month - about £800/TB/year - so it doesn't look like the cost/benefit is really there yet, given how cheap other forms of storage of this capacity are. And of course there's comms costs on top and difficulty getting it back, if it were ever needed.

I'm with you though, I'm sure this will be the way things move, and soon.

[Gostev]

I agree with James, I think cloud providers have to significantly reduce the storage costs before many people will seriously consider using them as an offsite backup location. Until then, most customers will continue backups to remote site. And small single site customers have even more flexibility - taking backups with them home on USB drive (we did that at some point in the beginning of Veeam), or backing up to home or remote office NAS.

I think the latter might be the best option these days actually... certainly not 5 years ago, but now when I have 60 Mbps up/down for $20/mo at home, I would rather do that instead of having to carry those hard drives around

[cwells]

[merged]

we are looking for an offsite repository to store our veeam backups. Does anyone have a vendor they would recommend? The ideal scenario would simply present a local drive to our windows server where our single veeam proxy resides, thus something like a WAN based iscsi target would be ideal.

I am currently reviewing solutions from jungle disk, carbonite, iland, and hosting.com.

[deduplicat3d]

Depending on your storage needs / budget, Amazon EC2... you get a full on Windows server with a ton of bandwidth.

[J1mbo]

Another Amazon service - apparently 1p/GB/month:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/amaz ... month.html

[dellock6]

Glacier is indeed a cool technology. It happens these days to be at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, and I met one of my friend who works at AWS right here. During the chat, he explained me a little bit about glacier, and at this moment you can use it only via API calls (just like many other aws services by the way). I'm sure there will be in the future many software connecting directly to it, or also having this possibility directly inside Veeam itself, why not?

Doug Hazelman from Veeam spoke yesterday at tech field days, and he explained a possible 3-tier design for Veeam:
- tier 1, via snasnap restore: fast, frequent, but data still inside the storage
- tier 2, the actual backup system, saving data out of the storage, less frequently (say daily)
- tier 3, outside of the whole customer datacenter, maybe towards Glacier or other stuff: long time retention, slow restore

Sounds a good design, let's see in the next months/years what Veeam guys will be able to do

[J1mbo]

Yes indeed - shame that customer demand has driven Veeam to effectively waste the development hours on supporting legacy tape, with all his brewing really.

[Gostev]

It happens that, for example, the largest Veeam customer will never be able to use Glacier or alike...
But Glacier and alike are perfect for SMB on the other hand, yes. And these two types of Veeam customers will never understand each other.

Everybody just has different backup sizes and bandwidth - as well as requirements, policies and regulations to deal with.