Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 23:39:44 -0500 From: Paul Pathiakis <pathiaki2@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Backup solution for freeBSD/Symantec Backup exec porting Message-ID: <547FE590.1050403@yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <999d7e80e60f466682c736f275b75788@Server02.ad.ezmax.ca> References: <999d7e80e60f466682c736f275b75788@Server02.ad.ezmax.ca>
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Ian, Check into BackupPC in the ports collection. It's very useful and very fast. It's a little bit to wrap your mind around when configuring, but once you're up and running, it's very easy to use. As for storage, I might suggest a RAID5 or RAID6 with 4 TB SATA drives. The drives are pretty much going to be write once and read a few, pretty static in other words. The whole retention issue for large companies comes under the Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) compliance. If you don't need to retain fulls for long periods of time (10 years), you could buy something like a SuperMicro 4U with 45 disk drives. With 7 drives per stripe, you might come out with 6 x 4000GB / 1024 = 22.5 TB in RAID 5 and about 5 x 4000GB/1024=19 TB in RAID 6. After that, 6 total pools and 3 for hot spares (a necessity for RAID5, kind of optional for RAID 6, yes, everyone, that's my opinion.) I would also suggest this is done with ZFS and RAIDZ or RAIDZ2. Also, if you want to keep growing the repository, they have 45 disk expansion chassis. (Of course, any vendor will do, but I try to keep my costs manageable - The enclosure is about $2K, the drives would be about 45x$100= $4.5K, plus guts for about another $1.5K... Total cost for this would be about $8500 or so.) You would end up with about with somewhere between 110TB (RAID 6) and about 130TB (RAID 5). Disk is very cheap these days. Also, ZFS will let you know there's a failure and you can rebuild. Digital tape over the years, may lose information. (Yes, other people will tell you no way. However, do you want to find out when trying to restore? - I'm speaking from experience). The other issue is keeping the disk powered and online. That's power and heat. More $$$ versus tape. Also, tape is a lot more mechanical than disk and it's sequential when restoring. When someone needs something back... NOW is not soon enough in most cases. Also, there is a misconception about backups. Many vendors have products that 'stream across' multiple media at a time. That is not a good thing. It means that you can backup fast. However, it usually means that all the drives that were streamed across have to be available to restore. Otherwise if you streamed across 4 tapes drives and only two are available, it means you will read the first two parts of the stream, unload those tapes, load the next two, stream those two parts... lather, rinse, repeat. People have to remember, backup speed is not the critical point of backups (you have to figure out a good schedule to get everything done but that's it.) it's restore that is critical. The backup vendors want you to believe the opposite as their restore speed tends to be abysmal. Oh, backuppc is free. What you save on Backup exec licensing will pay for your array. ;-) I hope this helps. P. On 12/03/2014 19:01, Ian Lord wrote: > Hi, > > I've been using freebsd since version 4.11 and always dealt with backup semi manually with dump, copying files over, database dumps, etc. > > By the way, not as a home user, but for 8-10 servers used in a SAAS application. We are looking for something more serious as we are dealing with about 10TB of data for documents, and 600-800 gigs of SQL database. Everything is redundant, replicated, etc, but we need a serious backup solution. > > We are thinking of purchasing a DELL Powervault LT2000 device which consists of 1 or 2 LTO6 tape drives with 24 slots giving 60TB of data space for retention > > I've read a lot on the subject and many people seem to do dumps on a remote HD, etc, but to get to 60TB of disk space would cost a lot and would be less reliable then a tape library in my opinion. > > We need something automated and reliable. Hopefully, with a nice gui to restore individual files etc... > > We already have backup exec 2014 for our windows servers, but they don't make an agent for freebsd. > Symantec has netbackup which supports FreeBSD, but it seems really expensive (A rep will call me, tells all about the price lol) > > I've read on Bacula and Amanda, and it really doesn't feel like a product mature enough (outdated documentation, no clear indication the tape library would work, etc). Their commercial counterparts are really expensives... I'm afraid to purchase hardware, new server, etc and end up with nothing working. > > In the past, we used backup exec to backup freebsd using their legacy backup agents in linux compat mode and it was working really well. We tried (without extensive effort) to make work their linux agent on freebsd without success. > > So my questions are: > > 1- Does anyone have a tape library working with bacula or Amanda ? Does it work well ? (meaning stable, reliable and good performance) > > 2- Would anyone be willing to try to make backup exec work on freebsd using linux compat mode ? I would be willing to finance the project up to 500$ perhaps other people reading this could also contribute to have more man hours on this task. > > I love so much FreeBSD Over Linux, but it's always hard to get support from vendors... We are even evaluating to switch our fileservers to Centos (where we also dump sql databases and could replicate important data from freeBSD) to be able to easily back them up using Backup Exec's agent. But this would be my last resort as I don't want to support linux box where everything else in in FreeBSD. > > Any help/comment would be appreciated. > > Thanks > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > Ian Lord > MSD Informatique > 143 Rue des Fauvettes > St-Colomban (Québec) J5K 0E2 > Tél: (514) 776-6734 #201 > Sans Frais: 1(877) 776-6734 #201 > http://www.msdi.ca/ > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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