No solution should be based on a single full backup tape that is
rewritten each week! First problem: if a full backup fails, you have
no backup. Second problem: if your full backup overwrites the first,
you have just invalidated (in any logical sense, while probably not
NetBackup sense) any incremental backups.
My sense is to listen to your business folks and trash the branch office
tape drives, if at all possible.
As others have said, "dedup" has created a shift in the way we think
about backups. With dedup storage, the first copy has full cost (some
vendors compress their dedup fragments for further space savings), but
successive backups use a small fraction to store new data. This gives
you multiple backups for immediate restore at the dedup storage site.
Many dedup solutions will replicate to another (perhaps central) site to
enable offsite backup. ExaGrid and Data Domain seem to be two of the
active players in this area. Be aware that NetBackup may or may not be
aware of the replicated data. Expect this area to get better (but
Symantec may charge an arm and a leg to get there).
You might consider all backups over the wire. IBM TSM's forever
incremental does well at backing this sort of thing up. With NetBackup,
you may find that using synthetic backups allows you to skip the need
for most full backups. Can you restore what you need to meet the SLAs
over the wire in 4 hours?
You might take a look at the Puredisk options.
As for full backups to one place and incrementals to another? Sure.
NetBackup requires incremental schedules to be in the same policy as the
full, but each schedule can use a different storage unit/volume pool.
One master ... one or more media servers.
More than just a backup and recovery exercise, you might consider
primary disk storage at each site with "snapshot" capability for primary
backup and then backup the snapshots to central. With the NetApp
storage I have, I can "SnapVault" to a second "filer", dedup it there,
then replicate to a remote filer with "SnapMirror". NetBackup can be
part of this, but is optional.
Lots of options. Please keep us appraised of your thinking and progress!
cheers, wayne
srabbi wrote, in part, on 2008-03-19 12:30 PM:
> I am designing a centralized backup/restore solution for 100+ branches. We
> are currently using NetBackup to do the data backup at a local tape
> library attached to each branch server. Our business folks do not want to
> mount/unmount tapes for weekly and incremental backup. So my task is
> to find an innovative way to solve this tape handling problem. We also have a
> very strict SLA for data restore ( 4 hrs) with business.
>
> I am wondering if I can keep the local tape library in a lock down state and
> use it for weekly full backup (i.e overwriting tapes) and do the incremental
> back at the central site. This means that each NetBackup client needs to talk
> to a Master and Media Server for the Full backup and then talk to another
> Master/Media Server for incremental backup over the WAN. Can a NetBackup
> client configured to talk ot multiple Master server? IF so, what is the way
> to configure it?
>
> My Branch servers are all Win2003 Servers and have medium speed WAN link. Any
> insight to the proposed solution would be much appreciated. I exhuasted
> seraching NetBackup documentation and I could not find an answer (yes/No) to
> my question. I hope Fourm members can anser to my question based on their
> experience. Thanks
>
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