Another Friday – yay! Today is the final installment of The Consultants Backup Strategy. Part 1 discussed home machines, Part 2 discussed office machines. In part 3 – we will go into discussing how to backup the office server.
How to backup a server really depends on how much data you have on your server. For arguments sake, let’s use fast food drink size to differentiate.
Let’s start small – less than 1TB. For a server with this small amount of data, it can be treated very much like a home computer. Setup an external hard drive (2TB at least) and run Time machine. Also find a company to provide you offsite data backup.
Medium – 1TB to 5TB. Depending on how your system is configured you probably have a set of external HD’s either in a RAID or not just storing data. An easy way for backup here is to just double that set and run a cloning software, such as SuperDuper. SuperDuper allows you to schedule a backup to run at a specific time. SuperDuper will do a file clone from one drive to the next. This is great because if your external HD with your data goes bad, you can just use your backup drive and you are up and running. While this doesn’t give you multiple copies it’s a great start. Another solution here would be a Tape Library. Companies like Tandberg Data or HP have products that would suit this need. Most tape libraries are rack mountable and fit into a standard server cage. Tape Library’s can hold anywhere between 10 tapes to 100′s of tapes!! Tapes are still the most popular way to backup, due to their robustness and physical size. Image a cassette tape, just a little thicker. It’s very easy to backup to tape, and then take the tapes out of the office. Especially with a TurtleCase.
Large – 5TB-16TB. The reason I set the top limit on a Large server at 16TB is because most Apple compatible RAIDs top out at 16TB per device. If you have more than one RAID you fall into the Extra Large or Super Sized category. If you are running a RAID of this size, you have no other option than to go with a LTO (Linear Tape-Open) Device. “LTO is a magnetic tape data storage technology originally developed in the late 1990s as an open standards alternative to the proprietary magnetic tape formats that were available at the time.” thanks wikipedia LTO currently comes in 5 variations. LTO, LTO-2. LTO-3, LTO-4, and LTO-5. LTO-5 was just recently introduced to the world, and can hold 1.4TB native (or raw) data. You can back up the entire RAID to about 12 tapes. With compression you can probably get 16TB onto about 9 or 10 tapes.
Extra Large/Super Sized – 16TB – over 100TB. Clearly you have a lot of data. How can we keep that safe? First – if you have that much data, you must be willing to spend money on having another RAID setup to duplicate your data. Essentially you would have one server for data, and one server for backup. They would be connected via Fibre Channel – allowing a throughput of 2 gigabits per second. Apple has a system called XSAN – this allows for multiple RAID devices to be shared amongst a Fibre network with easy management.
Now comes the issue of getting the data offsite. There are two options, but both are very expensive. First option is to get a Tape Library such as the HP Storage Works. This beast can hold up to 96 LTO-5 tapes, backing up 288TB of data (at full compression)! It connects over an 8gbit fibre connection. You can always have more than one of these connected to your system, but considering the $47,000 price tag for the device alone (not including the tapes) – make sure you are utilizing it well. Then buy enough Turtle Cases to pack up all 96 tapes and carry them out the door. Option two is to build another RAID system (much like in our onsite example) and have them in another location connected with a 1 gigabit Fibre cable (installed by a specialized ISP) connecting from your office to the remote office. Contact your ISP about this, but the price is based on mileage and security (a protected sonet ring). Either way if you have this much data, just make sure allocate the appropriate funds to pay for it.
Well that’s it for The Consultants Backup Strategy. I hope you learned something from it. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment here on the blog, or contact us directly via the submissions page. Good luck!
