On 10/19/2012 12:15 AM, Ski Kacoroski wrote:
Hi,
I could use some advice on backup options. I have a 4yr old Data Domain that
has worked perfectly, but it is totally filled (actually overfilled) and pricey
to maintain. It is located at the remote site connected to my primary site by
fiber and I just NFS mount it to my backup server. A full backup is around
23TB and my backup set of fulls and incrementals around 90TB. My data growth
has been around 20% a year, but if the school district decides to move to
student portfolios, it will easily double and maybe triple in a few years. I
am not a 7x24 shop so for all my applications and databases, I just dump the
files at night and back them up. I generate about 600GB of long term archive
data a year that goes to LTO3 tape. The primary purpose is for disaster
recovery although we do about 1 - 2 file restores a month. 90% of the data in
on an EMC VNX that I backup via NDMP. So far I am safely within my backup
window, but that may change if I double or triple the data. Op
ti
ons I am looking at are:
1. Plain disk with an nfs server on it, no dedup. This is definitely the least
expensive option and can grow cheaply to handle my worst case data growth
2. Data Domain - very pricey as it is about 5x cost of option #1 for about the
same logical capacity. At worst case data growth I will need another one or
another forklift upgrade.
3. Data Domain used - does not come with software support, and about 1.5x cost
of #1. At worst case data growth I will need another one or another forklift
upgrade. I am concerned about lack of software support.
4. A ZFS system with dedup. About 2x the cost of #1, and from what I hear the
dedup is not good for this application (e.g. backup software kind of breaks
dedup on ZFS) so I am assuming minimal dedup savings. This can grow to handle
worst case data growth.
5. 4 Drive, 48 slot LTO5 library. Same cost as #1 and by swapping tapes once a
week or every other week I can handle worst case data growth,
6. Exagrid - I suspect this will be the same cost as the Data domain
Any other options I should be looking at? What would you do in my case?
I appreciate and look forward to your responses.
You can also use ZFS without dedup and just set compression=on. This
works very well for us. But, if there is a lot of redundancy in your
data, you may want to try the deup option, just make sure you get a lot
of RAM. There are many inexpensive bits of hardware that will get your
price down below $.30/gb for this method, including a refurb X4500,
Supermicro 36 bay platform (12 front, 24 back), plus SAS expansion
chassis like the RaidInc EBOD and other similar things. Throw in 2 or
3TB disks and you've got a huge amount of capacity.
The nice thing about ZFS is that you have a way of knowing when the
disks lie to you about the data. You have built-in data integrity, which
isn't true for most other things. LTO5 library is very cost effective at
about .05 to .10/GB, but you really only get the low price once you
start building at scale, and you have to add in the cost of setting up
and maintaining all of the backup software. Still, it's a good solution,
but you don't get the data integrity unless you add something on top of
it that checks every once in a while and keep multiple copies yourself
to recover.
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