[ale] Backup strategies

[Jeff Lightner]

Not familiar with the PowerVault line but there are many tape "robots"
or "libraries" that will handle the tape movement for you.   I've seen
them with as few as 2 drives and 10 slots.  I'm sure there are probably
smaller models that have only 1 drive and fewer slots as well.   Here we
use a library with 20 drives and 600 slots (not to mention some Data
Domain deduplication devices) but we're doing substantially more than
500 GB.

Of course tape handling also requires someone to eject the tapes and
hand them to the offsite folks but you presumably have to do that for
your USB solution as well.

The Data Domain units mentioned above actually store compressed and
"deduplicated" data so you have lot less storage requirement for the
unit than for the original data.  Very high ratios - I've seen people
report 90 to 1 for multiple backups of DBs - We don't get quite that
high but it is definitely magnitude or order better than simple tape
compression.   The deduplication is sort of like incremental backups at
a block level rather than at a file level.   

Another benefit to Data Domain is you can have one unit in your data
center and another in your offsite storage center and the backup images
will be transferred from the data center so that you never have to
manually move anything from one site to another.

There are many vendors doing deduplication.   EMC has a big push on for
their solutions now (we had done DD before this).  

I would definitely NOT leave it all on one device (NAS or Dedupe) in the
data center.   What happens if that one device fries?  What happens if
you lose the data center and lose both the original 500 GB and whatever
you'd backed up in a device in the same location?

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Pat
Regan
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2008 2:53 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Backup strategies

Stephen Benjamin wrote:
> A dell PowerVault 122T costs as little as $300 -- plus $25/tape or so.
> 
> 500GB would take 2-3 tapes depending on compression levels.
> 
> Seems more economical to me than using portable hard drives.
> 

Who is going to swap the tapes during the backup?  Won't that make it
very uneconomical?

Pat
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