Minimum hardware can only be answered with the help of your recovery
SLA.  Otherwise I would say one master/media with 1 tape drive for
each type of tape you use.  With this your recovery time may not be
fast enough for a medium to large environment, but the phrase
"minimum hardware" tends to imply you have all the time in the world.

Now, if your media servers each have 15 drives backing up a total of
1200 clients I might bump that up to 4 tape drives, but it's still a
question for management/policy at heart.  How long do you want it to
take?  Do you want to restore everything or just the critical
machines?  Which ones are the critical machines?  As future machines
are added, what will be the criteria for determining whether or not
they are critical?  You may need to remind management that adding
critical machines means adding restore hardware at your DR site (if
you have one) or adding budget to the DR plan in the case of an
actual disaster.

Catalogs should be vaulted like regular backups with or without
purchasing the vault add-on; there are plenty of poor man's vault
scripts floating around.  The vault site could be a professional
facility like Iron Mountain or a remote office at your company, be it
the other end of the complex, across town, in another state, or
whatever the company can afford.

I had one client who said the other end of the complex would be fine
"cuz if we get hit by a tornado, we've got bigger problems than
losing 3 months of data."  I recommended against it, but it was a fast
paced environment where data more than 3 months old was worthless and
they figured it would take them that long to rebuild to a point where
they could use it.  Just remember, if they decide on something you
think is stupid, protest in writing and get them to sign it.


On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Donaldson, Mark wrote:

> We're playing with theoritical disasters here (personally I like to take out
> the data center with a meteor in these exercises).
>
> I have a SSO setup, one master/media server and three more media servers.
>
> What's my minimum hardware for recovery?  How are you protecting your
> catalog offsite?
>
> I have some pretty good ideas but in order to keep see the maximum response,
> I'll keep those to myself and leave it open-ended.
>
> Thanks!
> -Mark
>

--
D. Joe Royer II, CISSP, VCP