Best/fastest/largest backup options to backup 700GB or more of data (between servers too) ?



Hi there,


I'm just taking a survey on what everyone thinks is a good backup
option for a small company.


Currently we use external drives to backup our data spread over 4
servers. ServerA in a months worth of incrimental backups swells to
say 500gb, ServerB after 1 month is around 50gb, ServerC is around
70GB, and ServerD is about 100gb. So about 730 in one months time of
space is needed (uncompressed).


ServerA has a 500gb external drive, while ServerB has a 160gb, Server C

has a 250gb, ServerD has a 500gb one. We have 3 sets of external
drives so we can cycle 2 of the drives every week and each quarter
leave one behind (we can only go back 1 quarter).


So in the new system we want to be able to goto any quarters worth of
data or go back to any year (so you would have to keep 4 quarters each
year, pull these tapes out).


We do have gigabit eithernet between servers.. I was thinking of
putting a tape backup device on ServerA and send the backup data over
the LAN from the other 3 (assuming this would pull about 280 GB/hour
across gigabit ethernet).


I found one device that will do 245GB/hour and has a total of 8 slots
for about $4000 (each LTO3 tape is around $100 and holds 400GB
uncompressed):


http://www.basoncomputer.com/GW823/item.aspx


So I'm wondering if this is the best option.. price range we are
looking at is $5000 to $14000 for the system. But when you factor in
that one tape wont hold all 700 GB data in 1 month.. we need multiple
tapes. We also would like to be able to direct data to goto specific
tapes in the loader.. so one server would use 2 tapes, the other 3
servers would have 3 seperate tapes. I'm not sure if this is possible.



Also wondering if it is possible to take the SCSI cable going from the
tape drive system and split it 4 ways, so we could avoid the bottleneck

of the Ethernet speeds (which spec wise doesnt look that bad, but
reality is usually slower).


I'm assuming harddrive arrays or NAS are out of the question as we need

to be able to take a backup set for a given week/month/quarter/year
offsite.


Thanks

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: BACKUP locks up a directory?
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