Enterprise Backup on Hard Drives using ESATA Docks!
I work for a small ‘shop’ so to speak with about 150 users and 10-12 servers. We regularly backup about 1tb of data and about 500gb nightly for email servers, sql servers, etc. The server hardware is all HP Proliant and our backup hardware consisted of an HP Ultrium LTO Autoloader. The backup software we chose is Veritas Backup Exec, now made available by Symantec.
Our backups ran regularly and ran slowly due to the tape medium being what it is, nothing we tried would speed them up and thus after years of struggling with tape we decided to look into a cost effective backup to disk strategy. Read on for the details…..The challenge:
1. Eliminate tape backups.
2. Speed up backup/restore times.
3. Find a cost effective solution for 1 and 2.
4. Efficiently backup Exchange 2007 Servers, SQL Servers, and Various Data.
The solution:
1. Disk based backup on to low cost 1tb SATA drives using an ESATA Dock.
2. Cases to store the hard drives in after usage.
We started by trying to find the best possible price on 1tb Hard Drives…and we checked every reseller we could inclusive of Amazon.com. We were able to secure 36 drives for about $79 per drive (Western Digital 1tb Black). We then needed to store the hard drives in protective cases, we went with WiebeTech. The last two pieces of the puzzle were half height ESATA pci-express cards and ESATA docks. The cards we went with were Iogear Esata Cards. The dock is by ThermalTake. Pictures of all items are below.
Once we had the cards installed on servers running both Windows 2003 R2 and Windows 2008 we configured Veritas Backup Exec to see these as removable storage (very simple process). (A reminder that when a drive is first introduced to the server via the dock, it must be partitioned..we created one large NTFS partition.). The next step was to configure our various backup jobs to write to the new removable device; again a very simple process. We started with doing a test run on a Exchange 2007 server that houses about 50 mailboxes and a total of 150gb of data. Voila, to our surprise we were backing up data at 1.8gb per minute and eventually got a full backup with verification in under 1 hour. WOW!!!!
Second we decided to run a test on a file server that houses about 500gb of DATA, various types of files in all different sizes. This was a little different then our exchange test but still about 3 times faster then our tape backups. The backup speed here ranged from 1.8gb per minute to 2.3gb per minute with an overall score of 1.9gb per minute. Again, very impressive. The whole backup was done, with verification, in under 2 hours and we were just overjoyed at the possibility of having a solution. How about restores?
The last and final test, always the scariest, is to make sure you can restore what you backed up. We deleted a few mailboxes and some user data folders (all which we backed up to another medium so we would not lose a thing). We instructed Backup Exec to restore these files and mailboxes and it started its work. Here is where this solution really SHINES. With a tape drive the backup software has to instruct the drive to load a specific tape, then it must scan that tape to make sure its the right one, finally it has to rewind/fast forward the tape to the location where the data resides….takes for ever. With the disk based solution – it was restoring before I was able to finish yawning. Amazing….. The restores came in at 2.5gb per minute and were done in no time at all….about 30gb of data.
But is it cost efficient? Here is how I did the math for this solution:
Disk Based Solution:
1. Initial Setup Cost: Dock, Card, Cable – $90 per setup – one time cost.
2. Hard Drive and Storage case: $84.00 for 1tb.
Tape Based Soution:
1. Initial Setup will depend on if you have a tape drive and or plan on acquiring one…so I did not include this since we already own an autoloader. (Single Drives are in the $1000 range and Autoloaders depend on capacity).
2. Tapes: HP LTO2 tapes are in the $35-$40 range for a tape that does 200gb/400gb(compressed). Therefore to store 1tb would cost us about 4-5 tapes or $140-$160 (4x$35 or 4x$40). Basically we would be spending almost double for tapes as we would for disks.
End Result: Half the cost, double the speed, and efficiency for recovery to boot. We had done it, we found a solution that worked, was easy to setup, and showed a significant cost savings to our business. I would love to help anyone that may be considering this scenario and thus I encourage you to contact me and or post comments. Now for the pictures:
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Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Hard Drive USB Docking Station
Western Digial 1tb Black – A note here…we bought these bulk for much less..the prices constant fluctuate.
