Effecient use of HW and offline backup storage

[gregom]

I would like to find a more efficient use of my hardware and also start an offline backup storage that I can either run weekly or monthly and then power off. The goal here is to not only be efficient but safe in the event of some major malware/virus breakout that could potentially destroy our backups as well. We have nearly 95% of our servers virtualized, with only three branch offices that still require a dedicated, physical file server. All of our backups are to hard drive, and then those backups copied to another site. Cloud backups is not an option as we are a government entity and are required to keep our data internal. Please keep in mind i'm not super knowledgable on the Veeam backup methods and i'm still learning so some things will need explained in more detail.

I currently run one primary Veeam server at my local site, it has seven backup jobs that run at the end of business day, along with three Veeam ENDPOINT jobs that run from those three branch office file servers. Shortly after those start I have backup copy jobs that run and copy the primary backups to my local repository, and my local backups to one other remote repository. I am mainly looking at how to improve efficiency of hardware use at our primary Veeam server site and also setup a local offline backup storage.

My primary Veeam server is a Dell R710 with two quad core CPU's and 16 GB RAM, loaded with four 6 TB drives in RAID 5 giving me 16.4 TB of storage for my Veeam B&R v9 repository. I'd either like to simply use this as a storage repository only or actually completely remove it from the backup realm and add it to our VMware infrastructure as another host.

I also have another older server, a Dell R905 that has four quad core CPU's and 32 GB RAM. The only issue with this server is it has 2.5" hard drive bays so this is why I didn't use it our Veeam server. I simply can't get drives large enough to get the capacity I need. However... i'm wondering if I can switch primary Veeam server functionality to this beefier server, and then keep my storage on the R710 but reload it with Ubuntu and create a SAMBA share to stick the repository on. This would be a remote repository but with the limited write speed of RAID-5 I think I would stay under the gigabit link speed they would have to each other. This would also get my backup storage off a machine that is in our Active Directory domain, and only a device where only one non-domain account has access to the data.

What do you guys think of this?

Next is an offline backup storage. I have five 3 TB drives just sitting here doing nothing, and some spare hardware. I have a bunch of either dual or quad core AMD Opteron CPUs, and a few dual CPU hand built servers. I have plenty of RAM I could get in them so i'm thinking of setting up a 13 TB RAID-0 server with 8 GB or 12 GB of RAM if I can fit it. Just throw Ubuntu on it and setup a SAMBA share and add it as another repository. Now my question is, what is the best way of doing a weekly or monthly copy of my backup data. I do full + incremental so I guess I could just do a script to copy the files over as just copying the full VBK file would already be a month old. Or is there a way I could use Veeam to do this more efficiently?

[DaveWatkins]

Don't use RAID0.... bad idea, you want to keep this data long term, putting it on an arrayt where if one drive fails you lose it all is probably a bad idea, RAID5 will be fine. If you're looking for a way to use your hardware for long term, offline storage you may want to think about setting up a virtual tape library box. Anything else Veeam will try and access periodically to see if it's still up and obviously fail.

As a virtual tape library you can have the "tapes" moved to the offline vault so while veeam is still aware of them, it knows they aren't accessable, you could also disable the whole drive and turn the box off entirely if you wanted. MHVTL is the software to look at and there are some post in these forums about it as well as a KB article

tape-f29/mhvtl-virtual-tape-library-t18821.html
https://www.veeam.com/kb2094

[nielsengelen]

The issue with RAID5 and big drives (I see you are speaking about 6TB drives) is that a rebuild takes a lot of time so it might be better to look at other raid options (RAID6/10).

[nunciate]

Just spit-balling here but you said you would like to use your R710 as part of your VMware environment. Why not make it another host but leave the disks in there. Then create a VM to run your Veeam software and provision out that internal storage as a vsan, a local data store or like that. Dedicate it to that VM and use it as your repository. You would be eating up CPU resources on that host during backup windows but I am guessing you do those at night when other VMs wouldn't need those resources. Personally, I would invest in a real tape drive or library and spin off all my backups to tape. Then get those tapes offsite somehow. Having online backup copies is great but if you have a serious disaster you definitely want offsite tapes.

[csinetops]

It sounds like since you have various severs laying around you could scrap them together and setup a scale out repository as to not have to manage separate repositories. This requires version 9, another reason to upgrade

Scripting will probably be your best bet for getting a monthly backup to that on site archiving sever if you want to physically power it on and off in between.You're either going to be configuring virtual tape libraries and messing with jobs in Veeam or copying files. Otherwise, you could leave them/it non domain joined and secure the file permissions really well etc This is what I do for my archiving/second copy storage (Altavault). From there it is streamed to Azure. Leaving it online you can let Veeam do the retention work. That being said, I also have my off site cloud copy to fall back on if my AltaVault were somehow infected....

Also, Azure and some of the other cloud providers have government hardened hosting now, worth a look, could make your life much easier.