New Backup System

Our backup system is starting to get a little "long in the tooth", if you know what I mean. Currently we've got a single Windows 2003 server running Netbackup 5.0. It sends the incremental backups to a fibre-attached EMC CX300, and then dups them off to tape. The weekly and monthly fulls go straight to tape on an Adic Scalar 100 with 5 LTO2 drives, which is also connected via fibre.

The CX300 is no longer under warranty, and disk are going offline left and right. Dell wants $16K to renew maintenance and another few thousand to upgrade the firmware on it to the current revision. Unfortunately, with the CX300 only being used for d2d backups, it's really not worth the money to renew and update the thing.

I also hate running Netbackup on Windows. I love Netbackup, but I just feel that I could better leverage its capabilities on a Solaris system.

And finally, we spend a ton of money on offiste tape storage every year.

So to sum up, I want to:
- Get off of the CX300
- Upgrade from Netbackup 5 to Netbackup 6.5
- Use Solaris instead of Windows for the master server
- Drastically reduce offsite tape storage services

If I go with a non-sparc server, I can run Solaris on x86 and save some money. I figure something like a Dell PowerEdge 2970 or the like. Those only run about $4K.

I did some searching and found that XStore carries a 24-disk SAS/SATA JBOD chassis for about $2500. I can get some Seagate 1TB enterprise-class disks for $205 a piece. Probably less if I buy in bulk. This will set me up with a smoking fast, 24TB d2d system for under $13K. Tack on the Netbackup upgrade for another $12K and we're up to $25,000.

This takes care of The first three issues I have with the existing backup system. Now for the offsite storage. We've been with the same vendor for about four years now, and we coincidentally only have four years of backups stored there. This year will cost us a little thess than $30,000 to store our tapes offsite. For legal reasons, we need to retain seven years so we can assume that our annual spend for offsite storage will nearly double by the end of 2011. So, it's definitely worth it to look into an alternative.

To tackle this, I'm currently thinking about a software-based, block level data mirroring solution. Something like Double-Take might do the trick. We've used it in the past, but only to keep user data on two file servers synchronized over a WAN. Generic user data is a lot different from compressed d2d backup images, so I'm not sure how viable a solution like this really is.

If the synchronization does work though, then I will look at building out two of these servers with two of the SATA arrays on each one. This should provide me with the ability to store all daily incrementals as well as weekly fulls on disk. I'll only have to offsite the monthly fulls. I figure I can just send the NY tapes to VA, and the VA tapes to NY. Or I could just keep the monthlies at the existing offsite storage vendor.

Anyway, with the synchronization piece, the project cost now jumps to about $55,000. If I can manage to trade-in or sell the CX300 and reuse existing servers, then this will reduce the capital outlay even more. I would love to have an ROI of less than 12 months.

I'll post more as I refine my plan. Input is certainly welcome.