Budget-friendly backup needed urgently

[ValiantMartian]

I've joined a small, family-run business that has an HPE Nimble Storage array with NO offsite backups. 12 vSphere VMs on 2 vSphere 6.5 U3 hosts consuming about 40 TB, but a very low change rate. There isn't budget for proper backup right now but I've heard nothing but rave reviews about Veeam products, so….

Are any Veeam products good, inexpensive options (perhaps Veeam Backup Essentials?) for at least getting this data offsite SOMEWHERE until we can come up with a proper long-term plan with a budget, such as replication to an offsite Nimble Storage array? No sensitive consumer data, so the backups could go to a NAS in my home lab (if supported). Another option is to get a couple NAS units that get physically rotated out of the office and stored off-site. Any recommendations on how to start setting SOMETHING up right away?

Once we have at least some semblance of offsite backup, management should be open to proper budgeting for offsite backup as we grow.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

If price is the key for you, then tape would be the cheapest option (and most reliable too), so that would be my personal preference. Rotated NAS is an option, but I would not recommend it: too clumsy, and they are very picky about being transported... I personally had an issue once after carefully transporting my own NAS, the issue fixed itself after I unloaded and re-inserted all drives back - perhaps some contact went loose - but RAID had to be rebuilt.

[ValiantMartian]

We've got a huge data purge underway, so we're hoping to knock down our storage requirements significantly.

I don't see us messing around with a tape unit anytime soon. We have a very small staff.

Can Veeam B&R Standard Edition back up to both a NAS in our data center, and a secondary NAS at my home office? We wouldn't need a long retention on the home NAS. This would be for DR only, and would be carried into the office in an emergency.

[jmmarton]

Yes, Standard Edition offers Backup Copy Job capabilities to multiple repositories. But since you mention Nimble, assuming this is VMware, you should look into Enterprise Plus Edition instead to get Nimble integration capabilities. Yes this costs more but if you are within the limits of Essentials (six CPU sockets or 50 VMs) you can look at Backup Essentials Enterprise Plus to keep costs down but still gain full capabilities.

Joe

[ValiantMartian]

We do have 6 CPU sockets and < 15 VMs, so Enterprise Plus Edition may indeed work! We currently have 7 different NAS units that get FILE-level backups only.

Perhaps the quickest way to get VMs off-site would be to run a Synology or similar NAS at someone's home with a fast internet connection. In a disaster, the unit could be transported into the office. Synology units have a built-in VPN server. Could Veeam connect to that VPN via SMB share as a backup repository until we have a budget for a nice enterprise-grade repository? If this seems like it would work, I may pick up some drives and a cheap NAS and load up Veeam Community edition and see if I can get connections working on a few VMs, then talk to Sales about Enterprise Plus.

The cost killer on us won't be the Veeam licensing, but the proper 'enterprise-grade' storage, which we can't do until down the road.

[jmmarton]

As long as there's connectivity in some fashion to a remote NAS, then yes you could do a Backup Copy Job to copy your backups to the remote NAS device. Another option could even be to spin up a VM in Azure or AWS, attach storage, and copy backups there so as to not have to depend on someone's home network providing you the storage.

Rather than test with Community Edition which is based on the Standard Edition feature set, you should contact Veeam sales about an Enterprise Plus trial key. That way you can test everything for 30 days.

Joe

[ValiantMartian]

Cool - I may just go ahead and set up a call. Thanks!

[ddayton]

Budget was a problem for our facility as well. We started out using two servers running ESXi V5.5 free edition and added Veeam B&R and Veeam One free editions. Our backup storage targets were desktops that we installed a pair of 4TB SATA drives running FreeNAS. The FreeNAS interface we tried SMB and then iSCSI and found iSCSI much faster and more reliable. Over the last 4 years we licensed VMware to Standard and Veeam to Enterprise. The server hardware was upgraded and ESXi upgraded to 6.5, so we reused the old servers still using FreeNAS, but now they have 8 4TB SAS drives. The two servers and the two NAS are about one mile apart in different buildings so the remote is used as our offsite. The production server backs up to the local NAS, then the job runs to do a backup copy to the remote NAS and finally all the critical VM's are replicated to the remote host using the remote NAS as the source. We finally added a standalone Windows 2012 server that has an 8-slot LTO-6 tape library with 8 4TB SAS drives in the remote site to use in place of the NAS and it performs weekly backups to tape for longer term storage requirements.