Best backup options for 700gb of data in a months time? Tape? LTO3?

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?
    ... You indicate that the BACKUP performance is an issue. ... I'm happy if I just end up with tapes that I can ... understand new tapes for the older drives can be an issue. ... Still pissed off at me, huh, aren't you Dave? ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: HALT, CONTINUE ==> CRASH. HUH?
    ... Something the console squats on, something with an I/O controller, software running on these boxes, a specific disk, something that sits on a memory lock state, etc. ... eliminate the need to maintain systems and servers; ... help with my severe reliability issues with the DDS tapes. ... Local usages shows somewhere about five to fifteen uses of each piece of DAT/DDS media and periodic replacement of the drives themselves was to be expected -- this based on the local usage models. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Server Migration - from old server to new server
    ... Get 4 drives, one acts as ... I really don't like to partition SBS servers, ... Dual core is NOT dual CPU, ... also backup the whole server Monthly, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Offsite backup options
    ... I like Exabyte VXA Drives for this. ... are sized and priced for what you need, and if you outgrow the tapes you can ... Any backup to a NAS, storage server, home server, or whatever seems like ... Can only do critical data ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Anyone using Iomega REV for SBS Backup?
    ... are there any issues/gotchas with using SBS Backup for restore ... We use Rev drives on lots of our SBS installations after experiencing lots ... install any of the Iomega drivers and just use Filestreamer RM. ... not so costly for DAT but Travan tapes are very expensive. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)