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

[Paul Beltrani]

You haven't said if they have an actual DR plan that requires backups
or if this is just a case of backups to check a box.  The latter may
sound absurd to most on this list but it's disturbing how often
institutions insist on backups because, "You know, backups are
important.", without any plan on what needs to be backed up or what
they would do with the backups in an emergency.

If you don't already have backup policy listing what needs to be
backed up along with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO)  and Recovery
Time Objective (RTO) you may want to suggest that as a place to start.
 If you do, the RPO and RTO are constraints on your solution.

If you're not already familiar with the terms:

RPO is a fancy way of saying how "What point to I need to be able to
recover to?" or "How much data can I loose?"  You may need to be able
to recover every financial transaction but be fine with only backing
up the wiki to "midnight of the previous day".

RTO is basically "time to recover".  To your point in the original
post, if the RTO is 1 hour then streaming 10TB back from the Internet
may be cost prohibitive, if not impossible.

In general, the more fine grained the RPO or shorter the RTO the more
expensive the solution will be.

Frankly, putting a backup policy together isn't that exciting but you
really do need one to properly engineer a backup solution.

  - Paul Beltrani


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
>
>
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