On Thu, 27 May 2010, Nick Webb wrote: > 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 ... > 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. ... > around the edges. Since this is for backups, I really need a > bulletproof solution.
Well, if you want bulletproof I'd submit that you don't want to go with something cheap and home-grown. Don't forget that deduplication can also help with your current dataset, especially if it's a lot of similar virtual machines. 7TB of Windows virtual machines will crunch down quite a bit even on an initial full backup, so you may not need a 12TB Data Domain (we have two DD880's in production and one DD530 in the lab -- we like the product quite a bit). A few things you may want to look at: 1) Supposedly, NEC has a product (Hydrastor I think) that's very interesting and supposedly a good competitor for Data Domain. We'll be seeing them next week to hear their story. 2) Have you checked out EMC's Avamar software to replace CommVault? It may or may not be cheaper, but you can run it on a virtual machine connected to your own storage (you pay for the amount of deduplicated data stored). It's a different architecture from what you're used to because it's client-side dedupe (agent runs on each backup client), but we've been using it for remote sites (.5-1.5TB each) replicating to a larger central site for years, and are very happy with it thus far. It also has excellent integration into Virtual Center if you want to go that way. They sell a hardware version as well (basically a black box like the Data Domain but including the backup software). Avamar can even run in a VM. 3) Another possibility is to move to Symantec Veritas NetBackup, which does software-based deduplication at both the client and media server ends, and can use your own existing storage (SAN, NAS or local disk on the media server). This also can run as a VM. Both the Avamar and Data Domain deduplication engines are excellent. I haven't extensively tested the dedupe in NetBackup. -Adam _______________________________________________ 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/
