Re: Seeking High Performance Backup/Restore Solution Solaris 8

From: Michael Vilain (vilain_at_spamcop.net)
Date: 06/11/03 

Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 14:23:53 -0700

> "John Thomas - Lucent ASCC Cary" <jthomas@ascc01.ascc.lucent.com> wrote in
> message news:3EE721AD.6000204@ascc01.ascc.lucent.com...
> > Feisal Gaffar wrote:
> > > Hello Folks,
> > >
> > > I am looking for a high -performance Backup/Restore solutions for Solaris
> > > and Windows environment. These machine resides on a Network Managed Platform.
> > > The backup should be controlled centralized from Solaris 8 box.
> > > A GUI is a not essential but What I do find important is schedule capabilities like doing thing via a
> > > cron job.
> > >
> > > My Finding on the internet:
> > > I have come across a product from syncsort.com, Backup Express.
> > > but I don't know them. Is there anyone who has experience with there
> > > product or or similar product. Some other are Legato Networker/Veritas?
> > > But I don't know if they supports multi-platform backups.
> > >
> >
> > What scale, like how many machines, total data to be backed up, time
> > window allowed, etc? Is price a sticking point? There's not enough
> > data to give you a good answer.
> >
> > I have had sucess using Veritas Netbackup with NT4/W2K Solaris and HP-UX
> > all off the same Solaris server. Comes with it's own scheduler
> > accessable via a GUI or cli.
In article <oqIFa.382998$EU3.29108759@amsnews03.chello.com>,
 "Feisal Gaffar" <fgaffar@a2000.nl> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> Here are the requested information
>
> boxes:
> Unix : 8
> Windows 2000 : 3
>
> I'm talking about a total of 118 GB of disk space that are already being
> used on this nms platform. Space between 118 GB - 500 GB.
> time windows allowed : 2 hours.
> Price is certainly a sticking point.? not to expensive.
> High Performance Backup/Restore(necessary )
> Commandline schedule (necessary)
> GUI schedule ( not necessary)
> User friendlyness ( necessary );It shouldn't take alot of time to perform
> backup.

[top-posted reply fixed]

Rethink some of your requirements and prioritize them.

Some of the things an Enterprise backup product offers are:

- centralized scheduling and tape management via CLI or GUI
- off-site tape storage
- on-line catalog of what was backed up on what tape
- lights-out multi-volume tape backups with supported hardware

Price may be a problem. Most multi-platform backup solutions cost on
the order of $100K. You have potentially half a Terabyte to backup.
That's not trivial. You also want it done "real fast". That's not
cheap either.

How frequently do you cycle through tapes (e.g. weekly full backups kept
for 3 months, daily incrementals cycled weekly, and a monthly full
that's kept 3 years)? How many tapes will that be? One site I
consulted at ended up buying $100K in DAT tapes alone. Granted they
were backing up 4-7TB weekly sending out ~100 tapes a day to off-site,
but it's a hidden cost of a backup scheme.

What's your backup time window? If you're going to do backups over the
network, install a private backup network on each system to be backed up
that's at least 100BaseT. Most of the network backup solutions do zip
if there's poor network connectivity. Your users will thank you when
backups are running as their connectivity won't be affected.

Oracle and other applications can be "up" during backups but it's best
if they're shutdown. You'll need to have a solution that allows "pre"
and "post" scripting.

You're going to need a fairly beefy backup server that will keep the
catalog. It will need lots of CPU and more disk storage that's almost
infinitely expandible. The site a spoke of has their catalog on a 500G
SAN disk. But their retention policy for tape requires keeping them
around for a while. They used a E4500 with 2 CPUs and 1G RAM. The
orginal A5000 box filled with 12 18GB disks was filled with the catalog
in 6 months.

The catalog of tapes and files can be a big problem for maintenance.
When you cycle tapes out of the system, the data entries for the files
on them must be recovered. Large catalogs take a long time to rebuild,
especially if this is a monolithic file rather than files for each
server. Some products don't allow backups to run while this maintenance
is occuring.

Is the backup system going to be used for data backups (most do this) or
do you require it to restore a system from "bare-metal" (not all do
this). Consider that when you evaluate products what it will take to
restore files, an entire system from scratch, and the backup server
itself.

Support is a big issue. Be sure there's staff that knows the product
available 24x7 via telephone support. You don't want to call up on
Saturday morning at 2am to find out that their support staff are only
available during "regular business hours".

If you buy a tape library, make sure there's parts available locally
that don't have to be flown in from New Jersey. ADIC had great people
and the Scalar 1000 was very expandable. The large site has 2 frames
with 18+ drives, eventually going on a SAN (so all the servers see the
drives).

Put together a RFP and submit it to various vendors. Choose a couple to
evaluate in-house. The person doing the presentation should be
technical, not a sales person. The big players in this field are
Veritas Netbackup, Legato Networker, and a bunch of smaller players.
I've used SpectraLogic's Alexandria on medium-sized installations
(500GB) and Executive Software's Backup Express in that large site
(4-7TB). Neither Legato nor Veritas bid on the large site.

You may luck out and find a product that "doesn't suck". There aren't
many out there in the 3rd-party backup space. 

-- 
DeeDee, don't press that button!  DeeDee!  NO!  Dee...

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