Business / Network Backup?

[Ben]

I just had a $6000 Dell Powervault bite the dust, and given that no one has signed a Federal budget, I can't buy a new one. And truth be told, this was foisted on me by our HQ and I've had nothing but headaches with it. I can get it rebuilt for $2500-3000, but am looking at a better use of taxpayer money.

Do any of you that work in industry IT use USB hard drives as backup drives? I'm currently looking at a short term work-around solution being three 1TB external drives and just using the Windows server backup software (tape drive is running on Backup Exec 10.x). Daily backups,  weekly swap of two of the drives with a monthly swap of the third drive for offsite storage.

If the above is viable, I would look at making it a permanent replacement to the tape drive. So I'm looking at both software and hardware (always on external that doesn't overheat for a really crappy, lack of efficient climate control server closet) recommendations, or if you guys have a better idea for backup replacement, I'm open to that too.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

[AZRedhawk44]

I've tried large capacity USB as a backup target under dire circumstances.  It is not long-term reliable, IMO.

I had 4 SQL instances targeting these drives as file shares over my datacenter LAN, then also used BackupExec 8.x software to write backup sets of other data.

It was too much I/O for the USB channel to keep up with.  Drives would intermittently disconnect from the USB controller due to overload.  Also tried firewire... same results.

Probably a little bit TOO cheap a solution.

What we DID end up doing, however, was pretty nice.  Instead of single-chassis USB enclosures, we got one of these:
http://www.sansdigital.com/mobileraid/mr5ct1.html


It runs a choice of 3 different buses... eSATA, USB or Firewire.  Runs all sorts of RAIDs.  We configured for eSATA and made the thing RAID0 for backup speed (multilayer redundant backup, so no fault tolerance concerns).  Cost a LOT less than you're talking about spending and it performs quite well.  Faster than our SAN can shovel the data.

[Ben]

That looks pretty sweet. How does it do re: heat buildup? Also, are you running this on the Backup Exec?

[AZRedhawk44]

That looks pretty sweet. How does it do re: heat buildup? Also, are you running this on the Backup Exec?

The drive is attached to the BE server, but it's just an NTFS volume.

Assuming a drive letter of K:, it was set up like:

K:\sql1
K:\sql2
K:\sql3
K:\sql4

For each of the SQL instances to target over network for SQL dumps.  This was initiated by the SQL agent, not by any backupexec feature (I don't like their SQL backup technique).

Then, for each of my actual file servers, I had a folder:

K:\backupexec

Under here I had backupexec manage it as a backup-2-disk resource.  It handled its own media aging and overwrite rules.

The whole thing was RAID0 so I was unable to remove individual drives for offsite storage needs... but I used a tape library for those purposes. 

If you didn't RAID this, I believe you can spin down individual drives and dismount them from the control panel in front of the device.  Then you could take a particular drive and move it offsite for media rotation.