Hey Stan -
We don't have 20TB yet, but I just checked, and right now we back up
almost 4 TB of Exchange data nightly. We choose to do FULL backups
overnight with a differential during the daytime.
We have 4 active nodes, with 2 passive in a windows cluster environment.
We use dedicated storage nodes to backup the Exchange data over fiber to
LTO-3 drives, and can get all 4 TB done in about 6 hours. Doing the
math, your 20TB would be difficult to get done in 12 hours (it will
depend on how many nodes, and how it is backed up), but with updated
hardware you might be able to get it done.
How much disk are you going to buy? When we have looked at a backup to
disk, then backup to tape option, it has been VERY pricey. When you
start pricing out 100+ TB of disk storage, it becomes very expensive.
At 20TB, you could only keep 5 FULL backups of your Exchange data on
disk. In our case, we would need at 100 TB just for 2-3 weeks of backup
data on disk.
So, even though we use an older technology (tape), the old ROI tells us
that spending $500 K to $1 Million for backups to disk might not be
worth it. Don't forget Legato licenses that you would have to buy, in
addition to any hardware necessary.
Just my 2 cents - good luck. Let us know what you decide.
David M. Browning Jr.
IT Project Coordinator Enterprise Backups and Help Desk
LSU Health Sciences Center
-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Stan Horwitz
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 6:42 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Backing up a large Exchange 2007 server
Greetings everyone;
We're in the design stage of deploying a new Microsoft Exchange 2007
server
which will be clustered with several nodes. We expect that within a year
after initial deployment, we'll have roughly 11,000 Exchange users and
20TB
worth of Exchange data. All the data will probably sit on an EMC
Clariion,
although that is yet to be decided for sure.
We will have a backup window of 12 hours for this Exchange server. We
have a
Sony PetaSite tape library with 14 Sony S-AIT1 drives, but we do not
want to
invest any money in that library due to the impending EOL of the Sony
tape
media. Our backup server is Power Edition NetWorker 7.4.1 (which I will
upgrade to 7.4.3 at some point) running on Solaris 10 sparc. We also
have a
Power Edition NetWorker 7.4.2 server running on a Linux box with a
Qualstar
tape library with 4 LTO-3 tape drives that is underutilized, but it is
in
the same room as the Exchange server will be, so we are not keen on
using it
to back up the Exchange 2007 data unless maybe if we hand carry LTO-3
tapes
to the building where our main backup server is located, just for safe
keeping.
If we lose the Exchange server, our objective is to bring it back online
within a few hours so people can continue to send/receive email, then
recover their old email within the next week.
It seems to me that we must include some sort of archiving solution in
this
system to avoid backing up the 80% or so of email that never changes and
rarely gets read to tape. I think we should do a daily back up to disk
for
and then go to tape maybe once a month for the full set of data. I
figure
that backing up 20TB to tape on a daily basis (or even weekly) is an
unrealistic goal over a Gige network, which is what we have in place. We
could go over fibre to our Sony tape library, but I hate the idea of
investing money to do that when I expect to phase it out in a couple of
years.
I am wondering what other sites with large Exchange servers do for
archiving
and backups and what your requirements are for your backup window and
recovery time objective.
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