We're pretty solid on our daily backups due to Veeam v4 But we're now looking at options for doing monthly or quarterly offsite backups for disaster recovery.
I'm curious to know what everyone is doing. We have about 4TiB of data to take offsite, I'm thinking there are 3 options, physical disk, tape, copy over WAN. Who is doing what, why did you choose that, and what other options did you consider.
Thanks everyone!
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert - Arthur C Clarke's Fourth Law
For this amount of data, general consensus today seems to be using external hard drive. I really like Drobo for instance. Found out about this one from Veeam Backup customer by the way
withanh wrote:We're pretty solid on our daily backups due to Veeam v4 But we're now looking at options for doing monthly or quarterly offsite backups for disaster recovery.
I'm curious to know what everyone is doing. We have about 4TiB of data to take offsite, I'm thinking there are 3 options, physical disk, tape, copy over WAN. Who is doing what, why did you choose that, and what other options did you consider.
Thanks everyone!
Hi,
Qnap systems are quite reliable, it can go as far as providing NFS or iSCSI sharing. It can effectively allow off-site replication using Veeam (if you have a spare server and ESX license laying around). http://www.qnap.com/Products.asp
We are primarily looking for an offline solution. We're generally leaning towards an external disk of some sort. I've heard of the Drobo devices before so that may take another look.
h
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert - Arthur C Clarke's Fourth Law
I have a Drobo with 4 x 1TB drives inside, i only use mine once a week to copy the Veeam Backup files to to have an extra copy to my DR Room 300 metres from my Server Room. How i manage my backups -:
1. backup all Vm`s to a LUN on my Equallogic SAN Every night - Using Virtual Applicance Mode
2. Backup the Lun to tape nightly - then it goes offsite with security every morning
3. I have another esx server elsewhere in building and replicate once a week all Vm`s Production and Test
4. Weekly just copy the Veeam files to the Drobo as an extra measure - this is good when you have annual off site testing just unplug , out in the car and drive to the DR Test Centre and recreate our enviroment. Also i can restore from Drobo to production if i need to.
With a Drobo you can have different size disks and upscale when you need the space.
There are many possibilites but its all down to what SLA you have to work to
As a side note i just completed my annual offsite DR Testing, Aswell as taking a Drobo and tape backups, I actually took a Dell Poweredge R710 2U rack server 2 x 2.26ghz 38 gig ram with myself.This server is my Veeam Replication server which is replicated every week , got to DR centre powered on the esx server and powered on 2 x Domain Controllers first, then Exchange 2003 with 230 users, then SQL 2005 server and 20 others Vm`s within 30 minutes i have a full enviroment up and running.. my colleagues were amazed and did save alot of tape restores
withanh wrote:Wow, thanks Trev, great testimonial and I appreciate you sharing your DR test results! That's two votes for Drobo and one for Qnap.
FWIW I tested the Qnap device and found it unable to run virtual machines using iSCSI. The throughput was terrible. So, in my opinion, it's not an option if you actually want to run the VM's that you are storing there. But you could copy them to something that is capable of running it I suppose.
The problem with that is that if you are talking about TB's of data that will take a long time and you likely won't meet your RTO. You do have an RTO right?
Eric, yes we are not talking about storage to run VMs on in this thread, but rather about cheap redundant storage to store backup files on - something with good capacity yet portable enough to be taken off site easily. Drobo and QNAP seem like perfect candidates for this.
I am actually choosing one right now for home use, need redundant storage for a few TB of various data - so I am watching this thread closely as well.
We've narrowed it down to two likely candidates. They are both 4TiB enclosures, the first is an iOmega StorCenter ix2-200 and the other is a Seagate Black Armor NAS220. I'm testing them with just using the basic CIFS that come installed on the devices by default. They are both relatively inexpensive, in the $400 to $600 range.
My first test last weekend was to back up all current VMs in one big job to the iOmega, it was ~2.75TiB in 20 hrs 30 mins. Not so bad. My next test this weekend will be the same data but broken up into 5 or so separate jobs (the same break-ups as our normal/daily backups) that kick off daisy-chain style. I'll report how that goes on Monday when I see the results.
Trev, after rereading it sounds like you are using the disk based storage for onsite/DR, and tape for offsite/archive, is that right? We're thinking of using disk for the offsite/archive piece. Any recommendations for or against using disk for that?
Thanks,
h
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert - Arthur C Clarke's Fourth Law
Well in our scenario we backup all to disk ( SAN LUN ) everynight and also to tape ( only because i run other legacy non vm machines to tape so it fills the tape ), this just gives me peice of mind ( working in gas industry the whole building could go up in smoke if i cylinder burst!! ) so i like the idea of off-site tapes incase we have a total disaster atleast we have a valid backup.
Alot of people just use disk to disk for backups and also DR which is great , just unplug a USB drive put it under your arm and take to another site DR test center etc.. but i like tape as a fallback option just to be sure..
Any other questions you have feel free to drop me a note
Gostev wrote:Eric, yes we are not talking about storage to run VMs on in this thread, but rather about cheap redundant storage to store backup files on - something with good capacity yet portable enough to be taken off site easily. Drobo and QNAP seem like perfect candidates for this.
I am actually choosing one right now for home use, need redundant storage for a few TB of various data - so I am watching this thread closely as well.
I would suggest to use any x86 box with either OpenIndiana or with NexentaStor (the community edition gives you up to 18TB of license to use) and export some iscsi disks to a veeam backup proxy and you´re good to go
I've had really bad luck with long term reliability of iomega products. Went through 2 ix4-300r rack mount units then I got them to give me a px4-3004 and it's still not reliable. Total data lose issues, drives dropping out of the raids, NFS just tearing apart VMware to the point no VM's will boot (long night that was), management console bombing out and a whole host of other problems.
I'm scare to ever use NFS not from my experience with iomega.
But we're now looking at options for doing monthly or quarterly offsite backups for disaster recovery.
