Help coming up with backup strategy

[bubblesnout]

Hi all, hope this is ok to post here.

I'm at an MSP in Australia and am looking at an overhaul of the backup solutions we use for our clients. Our clients are primarily running VMware ESXi with 1-4 virtual machines, total data use anywhere from 500GB - 2TB.

Sadly we are still in a position where remote backups aren't possible for the vast majority of our clients due to the quality of internet available in our service area. A few customers have high quality fibre connections but most are just small business that simply can't afford over $1,000 a month for internet. This being the case we generally perform backups to a Synology NAS in the clients office for local backup copies and then make a copy of them to USB drives that get swapped over daily - I know this is not a great solution but we don't have a great deal of options when direct remote backups aren't possible. This has been done with a number of systems, at the moment primarily Nakivo B&R which looks great on the surface but is quite immature and requires some pretty heavy scripting to get working how we want it (and their support is horrible), a little bit of ShadowProtect as well.

With Veeam being the industry standard I'm having a play with the Community Edition and am really loving it, pretty amazing that the community edition ticks most boxes and is entirely free. I'm just trying to decide on the best backup strategy we can use as a baseline for our clients, none of them have harsh data retention rules so it's really up to us how we implement as long as everyone is comfortable with the result. At the moment I'm running Veeam B&R on a VM, backing up to the NAS with forever incrementals (retaining as many backups as reasonable for the size of the NAS) and then running a secondary backup job to a USB drive attached to the host server and passed through to the B&R VM. The USB repository is set as a rotating repository to allow the USB drive to be swapped over daily, generally speaking this works fairly well but I want to make sure I get things right before I present this as a new solution for our customers.

Considering our limitations on remote backups and cost in general, does the above strategy seem reasonable or am I looking at this in the wrong way?

[foggy]

The strategy looks reasonable considering your limitations. If the internet connection is a major concern, I'd advise looking at WAN acceleration, with it in place, remote backup copies (or replication) will not consume a lot of traffic after initial seed. It is not available in Community Edition though.

[Adrian1980]

Hello Bubblesnout,

in germany we face the same Problems with WAN at many places.
Your Idea is quite similar to what we often do with small customers.

As you are a vendor and beginner, I recommend you to work together with a Veeam Partner for the first steps, to get sure you present a good product and concept to your customers.

Greets,
Adrian

[bubblesnout]

Thanks for the responses guys, nice to know that I'm not completely barking up the wrong tree.

I'll definitely read up on WAN acceleration to see how it could benefit us, might be the difference between WAN-based backups being possible or not for some of our customers.

[Adrian1980]

Hello Bubblesnout,

you can use this as a staring point: http://rps.dewin.me/bandwidth/
This is a calculation without WAN-Accel.
Every time I see WAN-Accel in action, I just think: It's pure magic...

[JHuston]

Due to the root cause being poor internet connections, I also want to put in a plug for WAN aggregation devices for your smaller clients. There are multiple vendors that have edge devices that can do WAN link aggregation and aren't too expensive. Take a few slower, cheaper connections and aggregate them to get your speed up. We do this at some of our satellite sites using Meraki MX devices and basic business class cable internet. It works well.