[BBLISA] Network-based backup in the Boston metro area?

[John Stoffel]

So have you asked those in your company who want to move to cloud
provider *why* they think this is a good idea?  And have you run the
numbers to show them that the bandwidth costs vs the time to restore
(no one ever cares about backup times...) is prohibitive?  

Also, do you have any rough guestimates of your offsite data needs?
Maybe it would make more sense to have some core business critical
data sent offsite, but other less required data stays on-site with
tape media going offsite?

We have tried to do disaster recovery cloning of our Netapps across
our internal WAN to remote sites, but it breaks down quickly once the
TTL goes up and the churn of data goes up.  Just one user creating a
bogus log file of 400G by accident sent us back weeks.  Ugh...

<rant>
Also, stay away from CommVault, it's terrible software, esp for
restores on NDMP systems.  It tells you it needs tapes A,B,F then
suddenly it stops and says it needs tape C, then tape Q, then tape G,
etc.  It's very frustrating.  
</rant>

Charles> Thanks, Matt.  I guess that begs the question, does anyone
Charles> have any experience - good or bad - with the professional
Charles> backup services?  We're a primarily Linux/Nexenta shop.

Maybe you could do a co-lo agreement somewhere instead?  Setup a new
nexenta box with lots of capacity, ZFS send your data to it as a
baseline, then move it offsite to a co-lo near work.  In the worst
case, you drive over there and pull the box back onsite to do a
restore.  

It might work if you just need to have an offsite DR ability, but it
won't work for backups too well since you really want to use cheaper
and more durable media for long term backups/archives.

John



Charles> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 5:42 PM, Matt Finnigan <mfinnigan at gmail.com> wrote:

>> You'd do well to look at a service that offers an on-site caching
>> appliance - coupled with a hosted offsite repository, you get the best of
>> both worlds, unless your site catches on fire/explodes/etc. Any of the
>> professional backup services will also send you media for restore if you
>> needed it, of course.
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 5:15 PM, Charles Homan <bblisa at homan.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> There are those in my company who want to move to a network-centric
>>> backup plan, as opposed to offsite tapes.  I'm not 100% sold on the idea,
>>> because when I run the numbers it looks like it would take weeks to
>>> restore, say, 10 TB of data if we have to download it on our existing
>>> network links.  The price of the bandwidth to get that to a couple days
>>> looks exorbitant.
>>> 
>>> What I'm wondering is if there is a facility in the Boston area that can
>>> accept our backups online, but then return them to us on physical media in
>>> the event of a (major) failure?  Does anyone know of a company that
>>> provides such a service?
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Charles
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> bblisa mailing list
>>> bblisa at bblisa.org
>>> http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
>>> 
>> 
>> 

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