On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Adam Levin <lev...@westnet.com> wrote: > > 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.
Yes, that is right. Although if the price and features are right, I'd be OK with a software based solutions, but certainly no home grown scripts or beta software allowed. > > 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). We had them look at our CommVault database, they said the 12TB unit is what we needed. Considering we have 7 or 8TB in one full backup that should give us ample head room for weeks of backups. > > 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. I've heard in passing that NEC has great technology in this area, I will follow up on this. Let me know what you hear next week. > > 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. We've looked at it in passing, but switching from CommVault to Avamar is a huge change and one I'd like to avoid if possible. CommVault works great overall. Worth looking at more closely, though. > > 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. Great to hear this from an actual customer. Will keep that in mind. > > -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/ > _______________________________________________ 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/
