I am currently working at a small company that has been experiencing a lot of growth. Over 90% of our data lies in the scanned images stored on our server. The structured layout of these images are held in a MS SQL 2000 db and served out using vendor software. For our local site I have a Dell Powervault LTO tape loader with Veritas BackupExec and that is conducting full and incremental backups fairly well.
However we also have two remote sites at different locations that also have similar servers holding such data.
There is no backup strategy there because these are consultant sites and the data is growing everyday - up to 63GB and counting on one machine running with 1 OS drive and 2 RAID-1 drives. The other machine is up to 35GB.
My question is what would be the best way to expand storage and effectively backup such remote data given the absence of point to point links and centralized backup strategies? Would something like external Iomega drives or Rev drives be a good alternative to slow tape devices? Would expansion and backup from NAS devices be good as well?
You may be able to combine your FC connections and NAS connections to a pool of storage fronted by a NetApp gateway. You can then use IP based "snapmirror" to move data between sites, and snapshots stored on raid protected disks for backup. The snapshots can also be replicated for consolidated backup to tape at one datacenter.
Since snapmirror only replicates changed data once the initial copy is done, you can get by with slower links between the sites.
You may be able to combine your FC connections and NAS connections to a pool of storage fronted by a NetApp gateway. You can then use IP based "snapmirror" to move data between sites, and snapshots stored on raid protected disks for backup. The snapshots can also be replicated for consolidated backup to tape at one datacenter.
Since snapmirror only replicates changed data once the initial copy is done, you can get by with slower links between the sites.
You could also use host based replication such as Veritas VVR to move the data over IP.
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