Dear tape... it’s not you it’s me. I want to see other storage
If you’re like me, backing up to tape for small to
medium sized businesses (SMB’s) just doesn’t make sense anymore. The high cost
of a tape drive, even higher for a tape library, and the high cost per MB for
each tape make backups an expensive (but necessary) job with $0 ROI.
If you had a
satellite office with a reasonably fast VPN connection between them, you could
easily consider replicating your data (one way). This would have the advantage
of having offsite backups and disaster recovery, but it is assuming that you
have the money for 2 of every piece of hardware it takes to run your production
systems. And two datacenters operating 24/7 is an additional expense.
You can pay for
cloud storage and replicate your VM’s offsite to Amazon or one of those file
hosting services, but at the price you pay per MB that’s more expensive than
tape, and doesn’t work well for large volumes of data anyway (SQL Server
backups, mail backups, fileserver backups, etc).
So, if you work in
a SMB with one office and a limited budget, but you still want to be rid of the
hassle of tapes, consider a removable disk storage alternative paired with a
non removable drive. More specifically: any machine (desktop/server) with a
PCI-e 1X slot and empty SATA drive bay will work, but gigabit NIC as close to
the production server(s) you are backing up is a definite requirement. If you
are backing up large quantities of data, you might go for option 2.
Backup Server O/S options:
Option 1: Ubuntu 12.04 with 1gb NIC
·
free
·
rsync
·
ZFS support for mirroring (www.zfsonlinux.org), send/receive
replication, snapshots
·
supported by Veeam 6.5 B&R as a backup
repository
Option 2: Hyper-V server 2012
·
free
·
NIC teaming in either switch independent or LACP
modes with different brand NICs or even a mixture of plug-in NIC cards and MB
NIC ports
·
can run Ubuntu 12.04 as a VM (option 1) to
handle backups, plus other VM’s to get more use out of server grade hardware
·
also use as for VM replicas/disaster recovery
Option 3: Windows Server 2012
·
not free. Standard edition (only 1 VM included)
will run you $900 or so.
·
NIC teaming in either switch independent or LACP
modes with different brand NICs or even a mixture of plug-in NIC cards and MB
NIC ports
·
Can run in parallel with existing tape backup
jobs or as a supplement to tape backup jobs (if for some reason you are not
able to replace all of them)
If you are at a SMB you probably would chose option 1 or option 2 as
they are the most cost effective.
The strategy here is to run a backup job (say through Veeam B&R, or
Backup Exec, or whatever backup software you are using) to the internal hard
drive on the backup server. Then (at a later time) rsync or robocopy any
changed blocks/files to the USB external storage. The external storage can be
removed for storage in a safe, offsite/whatever. You can even swap out external
storage like you do tapes. For our experiment, we went with a 4TB USB 3.0 drive
paired with a PCI-e 1X controller card. Both are recognized with no problems in
Ubuntu and seem to deliver reasonable speeds. We do a “monthend” backup where
we take the 4TB drive out of the safe, do a reverse incremental backup with
Veeam, and put the tape back in the safe. The total cost of this setup
(considering we re-used a desktop PC as the Ubuntu server option 1) at the time
of writing this blog:
$159.99 for the 4TB seagate drive (as listed on newegg)
$26.99 for the StarTech 2 Port PCI Express SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter Model
PEXUSB3S2
$186.98
Even if you wanted to buy multiple 4TB drives and rotate them out on a
weekly or daily basis to a safe or offsite location its still cheaper than
buying a server, windows server license, backup exec (or other) license, and a
tape drive or tape library. I will update this blog at a later date if we run
into any issues with this setup.
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