All, We've been less than pleased with the amount of touch time that backups have been consuming lately. We've been using DPM 2012 on 2008R2, using a Dell R720 with a Quantum Scalar i40 (two LTO5 drives, 25 slots out of 40 licensed) and two Dell Powervault MD 1200s. Total disk storage is a bit over 40tb.
Problem is, the tape drive is finicky, and DPM doesn't natively backup VMware volumes, nor *nix. By finicky, I mean that once or twice a month the robot would stop talking with the server, necessitating lots of fiddling to bring it back. Then there's the time to manage the tapes themselves, setting up the rotation to offsite storage, etc. We had procured for our UK office a Barracuda 490 backup appliance, and replicated their data offsite to Barracuda's datacenter(s). It worked well. So, we pulled the trigger recently, and are just finishing putting our US backups on a Barracuda 995 (roughly 70tb of raw disk), and are replicating data to Barracuda, and we'll be purchasing a unit sized between the 490 and 995 for our AU office. So far, so good. It's a beast - 4U, and around 150lbs (175lbs as shipped, on pallet with all packing material). It runs off 110v power, just like any other server. It's running v6.1 of their software, with 6.2 to be released RSN, with some interesting new features. But, it just works, aside from a few minor quirks that we quickly worked through. For instance, the 995 variant we purchased has a 10g copper NIC (the other variant comes with 10g fiber), but we don't have any 10g here yet (coming soon). It also comes with two 1g NICs. What makes it harder is that our Juniper switches don't support 10g copper. So we're going to have to get a 10g fiber NIC from Barracuda and put in a gbic for our Juniper stack to handle that. Not a huge deal, but not great, either. In the meantime, we're going to set up the three NICs in a lagg to help with backup speeds. Good points, aside from the above: o- Decent web interface on the device itself o- Going to the main Barracuda web interface (barracuda.com) allows us to manage all of our appliances at once o- Dedupe on the device is pretty darn good too o- Replacement device after 4 years if we maintain support contract o- If the device fails, they say they replace quickly o- In the event our server room goes up in smoke (or water, or whatever), they promise to load all of our backups for that site to a new device and ship ASAP. o- The SE assigned for implementation has been fairly responsive and knowledgeable. Things that make me nervous: o- We don't control the encryption for data offsite - we have to trust that they manage their keys well o- Our data is co-located with everyone else's (I'm surmising this - anything else doesn't make sense, though I suppose encryption keys could be generated per customer.) o- I can't look at the device logs. I have no real idea what's happening in there, and can't do any of my own troubleshooting - I have to call their tech support, opening a tunnel for them to get into the device o- I can't change the device configuration - for instance, I can't create a lagg for the multiple NICs that come on the 995, I have to call their tech support to do that, opening a support tunnel for them to get into the device. On balance, my initial impressions are pretty good. They're a bit pricey, but WAY less than, say, Commvault or a lot of the others. And, BTW - you can buy them without option to replicate data to Barracuda. Less expensive, but then you have to manage getting your data offsite. They say you can get the data to tape, but it requires another server - you can't directly attach a tape device to their equipment. Doesn't seem likely for folks to do that - we certainly weren't interested in it. Kurt
