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Poll: Your Enterprise backup method?

Originally posted by Soul.Survivor
um, HP and Seagate make tape drives.
Click to expand...

hp sells remarked Quantums IIRC, i know they sell remarked drives... as does Dell...

and yes Seagate is another manufacturer... not sure how i forgot them :eek:
 
Originally posted by SupaFly99
I'll back FLECOM on this. I don't always back him, but he is right with the tape drive issue, it's on its way out.
Click to expand...

h34rt.gif


always nice to see that everyone still hates me :D
 
Originally posted by Soul.Survivor
um, HP and Seagate make tape drives.
Click to expand...

HP Tape drives = Rebadged
Seagate doesn't really have any Enterprise-level tape drives anymore. However, they are the Travan/DAT king.
 
Have you made sure your anti virus software is disabled on servers while doing the backups? Anti Virus programs are notorious for slowing down backups by atleast double the time. Check out your AV programs if thats it you can throw a command to stop the AV software before the backup and a command to start the AV software after the backup is over in a batch file.
 
ah yes, good point... norton corporate is guilty of this to an extreme!

since it scans every file that comes in/out even network stuff, it kills any network transfer
 
Personally I can’t see how the expense of tape drives is justified compared to say a computer with a raid 5 array (or 2). Anybody care to enlighten me?
 
easier to manage tapes; keep them seperate from the server in case something happens like flooding takes out the entire computer or something?
 
Originally posted by Wiseguy2001
Personally I can’t see how the expense of tape drives is justified compared to say a computer with a raid 5 array (or 2). Anybody care to enlighten me?
Click to expand...

Easy... What happens if the raid controller takes a dive and corrupts the array when it does? No backup? Hello $5k+ for raid array recovery IF IT'S EVEN POSSIBLE, depending on the case. Am I saying that this is bound to happen? No. But I am saying that it has happened in the past and will continue to happen.

Also, tapes are a bit more mobile. Most companies have an off-site backup strategy. This allows them to have a copy of the backup away from the office in case of fire/flood/earthquake/Invasion of the body snatchers/terrorist strike/and/or anything else your insurance company tells you that you need coverage for. :rolleyes:
 
I hate tape, the drives die too much cost too much and are slow. It is much cheaper and easier to use a harddrive system if you can get away with it.

What happens if the raid controller takes a dive and corrupts the array when it does? No backup?
Click to expand...

Replace the controller and backup your stuff? And you can always have several backup servers at different sites to take care of things like floods, etc.
 
True, I was talking worse-case senario as an example.

BTW using remote backup servers assumes that you have adequate bandwidth between sites...
 
Originally posted by Nate7311
Easy... What happens if the raid controller takes a dive and corrupts the array when it does? No backup? Hello $5k+ for raid array recovery IF IT'S EVEN POSSIBLE, depending on the case. Am I saying that this is bound to happen? No. But I am saying that it has happened in the past and will continue to happen.

Also, tapes are a bit more mobile. Most companies have an off-site backup strategy. This allows them to have a copy of the backup away from the office in case of fire/flood/earthquake/Invasion of the body snatchers/terrorist strike/and/or anything else your insurance company tells you that you need coverage for. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

And if your tape takes a drive then your in the same spot :p Incase you were born yesterday, hard drives are now pretty mobile and are about the same size as tape cartridges.

You usually don’t have your backup in the same building either. That would be the same as you keeping your tapes onsite too... they are not invincible to fire either.


A good idea usually is to crossbackup or create two remote sites for backing up.
 
Originally posted by SupaFly99
And if your tape takes a drive then your in the same spot :p
Click to expand...
Only if the original data dies at the same time as the tape drive.... that's very unlikley unles they are located in the same building or room.

As slow as they may be, I trust tape. It's been good to me. I have yet to see either of my Auto-Loaders eat a tape but I've seen plenty hard drives fail in RAID arrays.
 
And I've seen 3 or 4 tape drives die (quantums and we only have 2!) the last year and a half...go figure hehe. :D Add up what those babies cost and we could buy 3 or 4 backup servers, not even including the tape cost.
 
ok so since we are talking about enterprise stuff and reliability offsite blah blah etc...

lets say, to keep it simple... we want to do a full backup of 200gb once a day, and keep two weeks back

so we need a tape drive... Sony AIT-2 internal Auto-Loader, and 60 tapes (4 for each day, plus an extra set, just in case, 50gb tapes)

that would be

Drive $3,067.16
Tapes 60x $56.63 = $3,397.8

total: $6,464.96

or we could get 15x Seagate 200Gb 7200rpm 8mb cache HD's to do essentially the same thing... aka one at a time, same as we would do with the tapes

Drives 15x $160 = $2,400
Removable Tray (kingwin) = $19.19
extra trays = 14x $13 = $182

$2,601.19

savings of $3,863.77

and you have a faster sysem (the AIT-2 is 6MB/s (12MB/s with "compression" aka you will never see it go that speed), the HD's are MUCH faster than that...) which is just as portable, and can be easily expanded without worry of what tape standard they will come out with next... you want bigger hds? great! buy bigger hd's... you want bigger tapes? you gotta blow 2~5k on a tape drive :rolleyes:

and instead of worrying about both drive and tape failure, all you have to worry is about drive failure... and dont tell me tapes dont fail, becuase they do...

and tapes can only be written to so many times before they have to be tossed, hd's dont suffer a similar fate

tape/tape drive prices are from CDW
hd/tray prices are from newegg
 
OK, it's time to end this thread... All we're doing any more is trying to nitpick others' posts in a twisted game of 1-ups-manship. No-one here is dumb. Attempting to prove otherwise is getting old.
 
Originally posted by Nate7311
OK, it's time to end this thread... All we're doing any more is trying to nitpick others' posts in a twisted game of 1-ups-manship. No-one here is dumb. Attempting to prove otherwise is getting old.
Click to expand...

agreed. Cheers
 
Originally posted by Nate7311
OK, it's time to end this thread... All we're doing any more is trying to nitpick others' posts in a twisted game of 1-ups-manship. No-one here is dumb. Attempting to prove otherwise is getting old.
Click to expand...
No kidding... why are people so condescending lately? It's like I don't even want to offer my help anymore.
 
Originally posted by Nate7311
OK, it's time to end this thread... All we're doing any more is trying to nitpick others' posts in a twisted game of 1-ups-manship. No-one here is dumb. Attempting to prove otherwise is getting old.
Click to expand...
So long as we all agree that Tapes are best, there'll be no problems :D
jk
 
Looks like I got here a bit late in the thread. :)

I will agree tape backup is on it's way out. Though I have a distorted view.

One of my jobs at the company I work for is Lead tech for an online backup company. www.firstbackup.com

You would not believe the stuff I hear from new customers, tape died after too many uses, tape drive died and can't find a replacement to read the disk, ect ect about tapes. The fun ones are corporate laptops that get stolen and such. Last week I was talking to the head of some corp about how to keep their laptops safe out in the 'wild', I helped him setup a couple things and now all their laptops go out with our software on it.

With the advent of everyone having high speed internet online backup has pretty much exploded in the last six months. So if I were an admin looking for a backup solution I would at least check it out.


Some of our competitors are:
www.ibackup.com
www.connected.com
www.backup.com
www.livevault.com
www.amerivault.com
www.ahsay.com
 
When I started this thread I originally was hoping for a little help with my slow backups, but I also wanted to get a feel for what everyone else was doing. This "rivalry" between the tape and dick crowd is a good thing in my mind, as long as it's not mud being thrown around. I've now seen opinions from people that have already done the tape route for years, and then moved to disk storgae. I'm too new to know the trends, so I appreciate everyone's inputs. I'm going to get Veritas 9.1 on the new killer-server and give it 2-3 weeks of pouding. If I'm not impressed, I'm going to push for a dedicated storage server and then offload that to tape during the day, since we are obligated to do offsites.

Thanks gang!
 
Originally posted by typhoon43
.....

This "rivalry" between the tape and DICK (ephasis mine) crowd is a good thing in my mind, as long as it's not mud being thrown around.

.....
Click to expand...

Wow, I guess he just put FLECOM and other's in their place.

LONG LIVE TAPES! :D

j/k FLE. ;)
 
h34rt.gif


actually

irony is i use tapes for some of my backups :p

but i only backup about 1gig of data from my webserver and use a 12 tape DDS2 auto-loader that i got for real cheap, and got a box full of DDS2 tapes for like $5 ;)

for my personal pc, i have all my important stuff on a 200gb hd, and it gets mirrored every night to another 200gb drive in my domain controller

also all my scsi arrays (24 10k disks) gets backed up to a pair of big ide drives
 
Several points:

1) Modern tape drives are way faster than most disk systems you will have in your servers, especially when you add in the overhead of the OS and filesystem (which brings you way below the theoretical throughput of the drive). This means that the tape drives typically have to rewind a whole lot during backups because you're not feeding data fast enough. One way around this is to use backup software which supports "interleaving", where you're taking streams from multiple servers and writing in the order the data shows up instead of one server at a time.

2) There's no law that says you must run all full backups on a particular night. If you do half your fulls on Tuesday and half on Wednesday, you can back up a lot more stuff, although it may require changing tapes.

3) Exabyte also makes tape drives. We had enough issues with their Mammoth 2 line that we've switched to a DVD library for backups instead. It's slower, but I have yet to see it eat any DVDs. So, tape drives aren't dead yet -- they're just dead to me. :)

4) RAID is NOT backups. RAID provides redundancy. Backups allow you to restore data even if the entire server died, including all hard drives & such. Think about things like fires, pipe bombs -- the normal data center type catastrophies. Oh, or HACKERS. If your system is compromised, you'd best re-install the OS and then restore the data from a known good backup.

5) We're now using homemade shell scripts to do backups and are having far more success than we ever had with commercial software. Backing up ~ 1TB of data on NetWare servers, a few hundred gigs of Windows server data, a few hundred gigs from OpenAFS, and config files and a few small databases off of our Linux boxes.

We're relying on #2 above for backing things up in a timely manner. Also we're just doing full backups once a month, and differentials the rest of the time.

We lost several servers with RAID5 arrays due to a bad batch of Segate SCSI drives. If it weren't for our backups we would have been screwed. We also get requests once a week or so to restore some file a user deleted. So, RAID != backups.

As far as writing our own scripts for backups, yeah it sucks not having a company to point a finger at. But, when you have to restore data that just didn't get backed up, does it really matter whose fault it is? I've never found that it helps.

Good luck with your backups. Backups suck -- the new guy always gets stuck with them. Fortunately I'm not the new guy, so I dont' have to do the day to day management of them anymore. :D
 
well obviously you dont have to do a full backup every day, i was just trying to keep it simple as a true enterprise backup system is complicated

DVD is a good medium becuase optical media is very reliable

and of course RAID is not a backup meathod, but you can use a raid to backup another raid, granted it would have to be in anohter computer, preforably in a different location, to cover disasters, acts of war, etc ;)

and please show me a tape drive that can transfer faster than a modern hd
 
Originally posted by FLECOM
and please show me a tape drive that can transfer faster than a modern hd
Click to expand...

If there is a *single* tape drive that could do that, I would hate to see the price tag :D.
 
Agree. I'd like to see a tape drive faster than a drive too... that would be very interesting.

Also to typhoon43 - If you are going to start bashing us, then we will just refuse to help you in the future. Starting a new fire isn't what we want.
 
Originally posted by SupaFly99
Also to typhoon43 - If you are going to start bashing us, then we will just refuse to help you in the future. Starting a new fire isn't what we want.
Click to expand...
Where did he "bash" us?
 
never read all this post but I back up everything FULL backup everynight from the workstations to one server starting at 1:00AM THEN that server backs up to my other server at 5:00AM which is in another building.... so I have three working copies all the time... you think I'd be dumb enough to buy tapes and drives for the price of 120GB 8MB 7200RPM drives nowadays?? You gotta be crazy :D

QwertyJuan
 
Originally posted by QwertyJuan
never read all this post but I back up everything FULL backup everynight from the workstations to one server starting at 1:00AM THEN that server backs up to my other server at 5:00AM which is in another building.... so I have three working copies all the time... you think I'd be dumb enough to buy tapes and drives for the price of 120GB 8MB 7200RPM drives nowadays?? You gotta be crazy :D

QwertyJuan
Click to expand...

At $51 an AIT1 tape, I was going through 5-6 tapes a month for our off-site storage. Now on AIT3, I'm only using some half the amount of tapes. The tapes now only cost some $55 each. Also my backup windows went from 25 hours to under 10 hours. I see tapes as part of my monthly budget and not anything uncommon to any business. There is always some sort of overhead when doing tape rotations. You should see my software assurance and maintance renewal budget, now that hurts.
 
So what you are telling me is that your tapes are ALMOST as much as the 120GB drives I anm talking about AND I don't need to have a tape drive.... just a few $50 raid cards for expansion...

QwertyJuan
 
Man, no wonder there are so many fights on here... you guys don't even read all the posts :rolleyes:

Sigh, this forum is getting ridiculous.
 
I'm not saying that the tape drive has more bandwidth than a disk drive. I'm saying the latency of the disk drive(s) is what kills you. After re-reading my post, I apologize for not being more clear. Consider the following typical backup "conversation":

Code: 
Backups: Hey, what files do you have?
Server: file1 file2 file3 ...
Backups: can I get file1?
Server: here you go
Backups: can I get file2 ?
Server: here you go
Backups: can I get file3 ?
Server: here you go
etc.

But what your tape drive sees is:
Code: 
write file1
... (wait while backups asks for file2, server finds file2, server sends file2)
write file2
... (wait while backups asks for file3, server finds file3, server sends file3)
write file3
etc.

All of those '...' sections are where the tape drive is still winding ahead, because it doesn't stop immediately after a write. If the '...' part takes too long then the tape drive does have to rewind, seek to the end of what it just finished writing and then continue on. Rewinding and seeking take a long time when you have lots, and lots of rewinds and seeks going on.

You probably won't see this if your tape drive is directly attached to the server you are backing up. If you're backing up across a network, the added latency may cause this to be an issue (it has been for us).

There are some other strategies to improve things when backing up across the network, such as "push agents" which run on the servers being backed up. Instead of the backup server asking for files, the push agent compiles a list of things to back up, and then spews them out to the backup server as fast as it can. We always found that these agents tied into the OS in wierd ways, and negatively impacted server stability. Your mileage may vary.
 
WOW the never ending thread, were the hell is jerry spinger or one of the mods to do the 'Final words' and lock it.

There i no point trying to persuade home/soho users when they have a choice of spending £1000's on tape drives and tapes when they can do it for a fraction of the cost and also much faster! than a reasonable tape drive could.

The main reason why tape drives are still used in businesses is more to do with politics the practicality.

ps- i have read the whole tread.
 
Originally posted by Wiseguy2001
WOW the never ending thread, were the hell is jerry spinger or one of the mods to do the 'Final words' and lock it.

There i no point trying to persuade home/soho users when they have a choice of spending £1000's on tape drives and tapes when they can do it for a fraction of the cost and also much faster! than a reasonable tape drive could.

The main reason why tape drives are still used in businesses is more to do with politics the practicality.

ps- i have read the whole tread.
Click to expand...

JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY !!!


LOL
 
Originally posted by QwertyJuan
Would this thread be counted as one of those "Too Hot For TV" ones?? :D

QwertyJuan
Click to expand...

No cheating, lesbiansim, or nudity... so unfortunatley no :(
 
Originally posted by Wiseguy2001
There i no point trying to persuade home/soho users...

ps- i have read the whole tread.
Click to expand...
Funny, I read the following in the initial post:
As the "new" admin to my company...
Click to expand...

Clearly he was looking for a way to back up his home computer, so my posts on our enterprise backups were way off topic. :rolleyes:

Tapes are still used in business because you can easily take a set of tapes and ship them offsite for storage. There is often a need to be able to restore data from a year or two ago. It's typical to send tapes off-site on a weekly basis.

Many tape libraries have laser barcode readers which allow you to label your tapes and keep a human readable label in sync with what the tape is called in the backup software's database. How does one handle this issue when shipping RAID arrays offsite? Are entire drive cabinets shipped offsite, or just individual drives? Where does one find drive cabinets which are cheap enough to make this an affordable solution?

I'm always on the lookout for cheaper/better ways to do things. If there's a managable RAID backup solution which allows for regular offsite storage, I'd love to hear about it, and it sounds like the ideal solution for the original poster as well.
 
Originally posted by bdavids1
I'm not saying that the tape drive has more bandwidth than a disk drive. I'm saying the latency of the disk drive(s) is what kills you. After re-reading my post, I apologize for not being more clear. Consider the following typical backup "conversation":
Click to expand...

you mean the latency of tape drives right?

because that "wait" or "lag" on a disk is what? max 12ms? how much does it take for a tape to go back and forth looking for something on the tape

and the point isnt to use RAID to backup data, its to use a single disk the same as a tape...

you need to backup 500gb? then get three 200gb drives and use them as if they were three 200gb tapes...

and removable trays are what? like $12 so the cost of the trays and removable drive systems is near null
 
Originally posted by FLECOM
you mean the latency of tape drives right?

because that "wait" or "lag" on a disk is what? max 12ms? how much does it take for a tape to go back and forth looking for something on the tape

and the point isnt to use RAID to backup data, its to use a single disk the same as a tape...

you need to backup 500gb? then get three 200gb drives and use them as if they were three 200gb tapes...

and removable trays are what? like $12 so the cost of the trays and removable drive systems is near null
Click to expand...
Yes, that 12ms is the delay I'm talking about. Now multiply that out for millions of files and you have how much additional delay in backups? Plus add in that small delay for rewinding and seeking on the tape, and add in the 1ms or so of network latency. You're talking about adding 3-4 hours to your backup time for about a million files.

I'm just relaying what I've seen in a real world environment using commercial software and tape drives. I've looked at packet captures when backing up to tape, and when backing up to a bit bucket. The conversation on the wire is as I described in a previous post, there is a delay which corresponds to the drive's seek time in the server's response, and I contend that that is at least part of what is causing us to not be able to get data off of the disks fast enough to feed the tape drives.

In our environment we have *lots* of small files. That means lots of those "12ms" delays with little backed up per delay. If you have mostly large files, you won't see this same behavior because you get a lot backed up per delay. I think the backup software only writes to the tape drive after a certain amount of data has been cached, so it's probably not quite as bad with the rewinds as I've suggested, but I do know that it has been a factor for us. The constant rewinding has prematurely worn out a number of our tape drives.

Our older tape drives had been slow enough that they were the bottleneck. With our newer drives, that was no longer the case. Now with our DVD backup system, the DVD drives are the bottleneck again.
 
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