Unitrends to Veeam: Rotated SATA media

[jeffhoge]

Sorry about the long post; I have a quick question but provided some backstory. We're looking to turn the key on a Veeam B&R purchase this week, but I need a quick hardware recommendation first. Thanks for any help you can give me.

I am currently working in an organization that has the Unitrends physical appliance backup solution. It's a 10TB appliance where all servers are backed up (Unitrends 822 appliance). There is a separate "disk archiving" unit which attaches to the backup appliance via eSATA -- it has slots and trays for 4x SATA drives (it appears to be a RAID or JBOD unit). Effectively, we're performing D2D2D: Every week, we rotate in 3x 3TB SATA Drives to this appliance (a 9TB array, likely RAID 0 or JBOD), we then perform an archive job to make a copy of the weekly backup data (like a backup copy in Veeam), and then we ship these internal SATA disks to our vault service… much like tape rotation. If we need to restore from backup, we bring the drives onsite, put them into the hot-swap trays, load them in the archiving unit, and then copy the needed backup set back to our Unitrends appliance. Our vault boxes do not have room for the array trays (only the SATA drives themselves), so we have to use a screwdriver to load/unload the drives from trays every week… a big pain.

Here's the Unitrends archiving unit info: http://www.unitrends.com/Unitrends/file ... c365af.pdf

Long story short, we are wishing to move away from Unitrends: It has caused many issues in our environment, from the installed agents having memory leaks and crashing servers, to the backup appliance's refusal to remove backups--causing us to need to call support at least twice per month for a "database cleanup." In my experience, Veeam is a much better solution for our vSphere environment (I deployed it in 2 previous companies), and our trial of the product is boding very well. We intend to purchase this solution by the end of the year, but we need to make a hardware recommendation first.

Since this is likely to be approved, but still a "surprise" purchase to our execs, I would like to keep the hardware spending very low. We intend to run Veeam on a fairly recent Dell server (R710) that we pulled out of commission in the last few months. Veeam will run either as a Hyper-V guest or running on the bare metal. I plan to use local drives to fill up the R710 for the initial backup repository, which would take advantage of Server 2012's dedupe features. Then we plan to use Veeam's backup copy feature to move the fulls to some sort of external SATA array, so we can continue to use our 3TB rotation media that goes offsite.

Finally, my question: Does anyone have a recommendation for an inexpensive array unit that will give us a similar ability of our current Unitrends disk archive unit? We want to be able to swap in 4 SATA disks (preferably without screws/trays), and it form either a JBOD or RAID 0 array that can be picked up by Veeam as a target. This will occur on a weekly basis, so ease of use is really important--if Windows can "see" an aggregate disk after inserting 3 or 4 disks without intervention, that would be great. It can be USB, network-based, or eSATA (we don't have an eSATA card in our R710, but I can get one). We would like to be able to insert these disks in any order if needing to restore them.

Last question, though not as important: Does Veeam B&R have the ability to keep an index/inventory of removable backup media that goes offsite, like these internal disks? It's not a deal-breaker but it would help.

Thanks so much for your help!

[jeffhoge]

After speaking to Veeam directly, it was recommended that we use the combination of a JBOD enclosure with Storage Spaces in order to facilitate the rotated drives.

Now I'm simply looking for an eSATA enclosure that is trayless. Does anyone have experience with Sans Digital?

http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-plus/tr4mbp.html

[foggy]

Does Veeam B&R have the ability to keep an index/inventory of removable backup media that goes offsite, like these internal disks?

Yes, in editions higher than Standard indices are stored for all backups within the specified index retention (in Standard edition, only for backups residing on disk).