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SAN as a Back-Up Device
Currently we are experiencing alot of problems with tape backup and I
have had some thoughts. Is it possible to purchase a SAN with a huge amount of disk space (say 1 terrabyte), then partition the SAN storage up and then backup the data from various servers to specific partition on the SAN. This would get rid of tapes and restoration of files would be rapid as no need to find tapes/load tape etc - and hopefully speed up backup times. now is this possible and would I need aditional software on the SAN or can I use my existing back up software to backup the data onto the SAN. This would be done over night. I have some experience of SAN. I am currently investigating the options and if this is possible. Any pointers to web sites would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.. |
#2
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#3
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Yes, and you don't need a SAN. Matter of fact, most mid- and
enterprise-level backup apps have virtual tape library support. How it's implemented and how it's used varies widely among vendors. Legato does it really well... An approach I commonly use with clients is to stage a full cycle of backups on disk, then roll them off to tape, and send it off site. Say you're on a 1 week full, daily incremental backup. You back up once to disk, then all your incrementals go to disk. You never have to do another full backup over the network again. You can simply continue to do incrementals, then consolidate them to another full backup. It's a time consuming operation with tape, but not so with disk. You can even do it all under GPL with rsync and tar (but no open file support). With no-name IDE Raid costing less than $5k per TB it's becoming very common. One caveat: In my experience, disk is less reliable than tape. Too many points of failure. I've seen controllers crap all over filesystems, making them unusable, improper RAID implementations that don't use hot spares, broken mirrors that don't show up as broken (until a disk fails). Of course, tape isn't 100% either. You should never have less than three copies of data you aren't willing to lose, and they should not be in the same building (preferably, they shouldn't be within several KM; in some circumstances, within several hundred KM). "Linux Penguin" wrote in message om... Currently we are experiencing alot of problems with tape backup and I have had some thoughts. Is it possible to purchase a SAN with a huge amount of disk space (say 1 terrabyte), then partition the SAN storage up and then backup the data from various servers to specific partition on the SAN. This would get rid of tapes and restoration of files would be rapid as no need to find tapes/load tape etc - and hopefully speed up backup times. now is this possible and would I need aditional software on the SAN or can I use my existing back up software to backup the data onto the SAN. This would be done over night. I have some experience of SAN. I am currently investigating the options and if this is possible. Any pointers to web sites would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.. |
#5
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You could use a Direct Attach Storage (DAS) terabyte RAID on your backup
server and lazy write the data off to a tape library for offsite data protection. Real-Storage www.real-storage.com "Linux Penguin" wrote in message om... Currently we are experiencing alot of problems with tape backup and I have had some thoughts. Is it possible to purchase a SAN with a huge amount of disk space (say 1 terrabyte), then partition the SAN storage up and then backup the data from various servers to specific partition on the SAN. This would get rid of tapes and restoration of files would be rapid as no need to find tapes/load tape etc - and hopefully speed up backup times. now is this possible and would I need aditional software on the SAN or can I use my existing back up software to backup the data onto the SAN. This would be done over night. I have some experience of SAN. I am currently investigating the options and if this is possible. Any pointers to web sites would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.. |
#6
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I believe that using a SAN for backup is being considered more and more.
However, as Ales alluded to, you still need to organise backup of that SAN. Prima Face, it appears that the SAN is *all* you would need: it has RAID, so should not cause a failure, but consider the following..... - someone overwrites an important document, and it's not discovered for 3 weeks. where can you get that file from? - the backup system has a catastophic failure, and someone deletes / modifies a live document (as above) - archive storage of important data: you may need to archive stuuf for IRS or other reasons. So you still need some sort of tape / CD / whatever backup.... the good news is that maybe it doesn't need to be quite as frequent.... you could maybe do the tape backup just weekly rather than daily. paul "Real-Storage" wrote in message hlink.net... You could use a Direct Attach Storage (DAS) terabyte RAID on your backup server and lazy write the data off to a tape library for offsite data protection. Real-Storage www.real-storage.com "Linux Penguin" wrote in message om... Currently we are experiencing alot of problems with tape backup and I have had some thoughts. Is it possible to purchase a SAN with a huge amount of disk space (say 1 terrabyte), then partition the SAN storage up and then backup the data from various servers to specific partition on the SAN. This would get rid of tapes and restoration of files would be rapid as no need to find tapes/load tape etc - and hopefully speed up backup times. now is this possible and would I need aditional software on the SAN or can I use my existing back up software to backup the data onto the SAN. This would be done over night. I have some experience of SAN. I am currently investigating the options and if this is possible. Any pointers to web sites would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.. |
#7
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In article , paul.
says... I believe that using a SAN for backup is being considered more and more. However, as Ales alluded to, you still need to organise backup of that SAN. this is the exact requirement that is fueling the growth in "ide/sata-FC" these low cost RAIDs (compared to to FC or SCSI hard drive based RAIDs) excell at "streaming" type applications & most 1st line backup packages (CA, Veritas, etc.) have D2D (disk to disk) backup standard _____ . . ' \\ . . | O// . . | \_\ . . | | | . . . | / | . www.EvenEnterprises.com . . . | / .| . . . | / . | 310-544-9439 / 310-544-9309 fax . . . o ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Authorized - DIRECT VAR/VAD/Distributor for new SCSI/FC-AL peripherals NAS/SAN/RAID from HP, IBM, Seagate, EMC, QLogic, ATL, OverLand Data |
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