All, I work at a rather small University and we currently are doing almost no backup to disk, but have a project in pipeline to change that. Our weekly "full" backup set is around 7TB and growing slowly, and a big part of that is VMware image backups as about half our systems are virtualized now. We use CommVault for our tape backups and it works well for us, but we are unimpressed by it's deduplication features and are looking for 3rd party solutions. Right now the idea is to use CommVault to archive systems directly to disk over iSCSI or CIFS, then backup a selected data set to tape from that (for offsite protection). If we can swing it with our budget, we also have another site at the edge of campus where we could place another disk unit and replicate data.
Many vendors offer compelling deduplication solutions, such as DataDomain (now owned by EMC -- http://www.datadomain.com), that we can easily mount on our backup server and pump archive data into. DataDomain is the best solution I've seen on paper, but it's right at the top end of our budget for just one 12TB unit. For the price of their 12TB device we could easily buy two Linux or Windows servers each with 24TB+ of directly attached SATA storage and still have $15-20K left over for deduplication or replication software. Are there other options out there that have worked well on similar projects? I've seen a open source project that may work for this, but it still looks a little green (http://www.opendedup.org). I've also tried out NexentaStor (http://www.nexenta.com), which in my opinion did a horrible job of deduplicating our data and also is quite rough around the edges. Since this is for backups, I really need a bulletproof solution. Thanks for any tips you may have! Thanks, Nick _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
