Long term disk retention (dedup appliance?)

[chadtandy]

Hi all,

I have been tasked with coming up with a solution to retain backups on disk for "up to" a year. How long can a forever reverse incremental backup chain reliably be? We are currently evaluating going with cheap dumb disk (Powervault or NexSAN) compared to a dedup appliance (Exagrid or Dell). If we have to maintain multiple fulls than a dedup appliance starts to become the go to solution. And for reference we are talking about ~40TB just for full backups. Today we have ~80TB for 30-45 days of backups on disk.

Also, what are users experience with an Exagrid type device as far as backup performance? I know they advertise huge ingest rates into their landing zone, but does this hold up when streaming backups from up to 12 jobs simultaneously? We've traditionally had to use pretty decent disk on an older SAN to meet our backup windows. I just have a hard time believing a few 7k disks will be fast enough.

Thanks,
-Chad

[chrisdearden]

Do you have to maintain daily backups for that whole year? If monthly gfs points work for you then a backup copy job with 30 days+12 months to a secondary device should do the trick. The load on a copy job repositoryis less important as the copy job generally has longer to run. Using a dedupe appliance might reduce the full backup size a little as you benefit from a global dedupe. You would still need to size it accordingly.

[foggy]

How long can a forever reverse incremental backup chain reliably be?

Chad, please also review this thread for considerations regarding long reversed incremental chains. Thanks.