State of Storage in SMB and enterprise (discussion and giveaway) #HPStorage

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4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#721099 22-Nov-2012 08:38

We have a number of servers of varying vintage and are in the early stages of using Commvault on an IBM 3650 M3 server, and an IS3100 tape drive. Daily backup with offsite storage.

The question of retention of data is an interesting one, governed for most commercial entities by tax or IRS rules - financial backups have to be kept for at least 7 years where I am. Makes it interesting when you change ERP systems, but have to keep the old datafiles readable for seven years after implementation.

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freitasm

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#721101 22-Nov-2012 08:40

"Readable" is the keyword here.

If you use tapes to store documents then you have to keep them for at least that long - including the drives that can read then.

If you use a deduplication solution then you have to keep not only the media and drives, but also the software to read these back in the correct order.

Any business investment in storage is a long term one, unless you do a complete migration every time you change technology, and this is not feasible really.

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gjm

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Ultimate Geek

#721380 22-Nov-2012 15:15

yeah we had a problem earlier this year when we kind of needed to get some info off our backups of a very old AS400. Had some tapes but no working drive anywhere. In the end we just flagged it as it wasnt mission critical but it was good reminder of things you need to think about.

[Amstrad CPC 6128: 128k Memory: 3 inch floppy drive: Colour Screen]

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#721381 22-Nov-2012 15:22

Folks, keep talking! These are all good comments and ideas and the more you post here, better and easier for me to decide on the names to send up ;)

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#721382 22-Nov-2012 15:22

We sell only LTO tape technology now, as it means we can pretty easily get hold of the older tape technology from various sources.

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#721390 22-Nov-2012 15:24

I'll be a lot happier when UFB is available in Auckland CBD since getting data to offsite backups will be so much cheaper, and with a lot of ISP's providing free on-net traffic, it will make the idea of hosted backups more manageable.

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#721405 22-Nov-2012 15:44

It is amazing how many of the SMB's are using Synctoy. It is such a simple program and concept that just works....

My views (except when I am looking out their windows) are not those of my employer.

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#721479 22-Nov-2012 17:53

Anyone currently in a storage project with strange/huge/big data requirements?

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monkey300

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Master Geek

#721480 22-Nov-2012 17:55

For online backups we use SOS Online Backup

- Home office edition supports up to 5 computers with 50gb storage
- Very cheap $60 USD per year with the 25% PC Mag discount
- Does a very good job backing up files currently in use
- Only transfers changed parts of files
- Nightly email reporting coming into us allows us to check if any files were skipped and how much was transferred.

For on-site backups we have tended to use USB flash drives or HDDs for smaller companies and NAS units for medium size companies.

A few weeks ago we deployed a HP Microserver G7 n40L Microserver with 4x2TB drives set up in RAID 1 as a NAS for a client with reasonably high backup demands - much cheaper and faster than most dedicated NAS units in the same price range.

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#721482 22-Nov-2012 18:00

freitasm: Anyone currently in a storage project with strange/huge/big data requirements?

Define Huge? I have a customer who needs 12-16TB

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#721490 22-Nov-2012 18:13

Huge as in petabyte huge? Is there anything like this in New Zealand?

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webfish

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#721492 22-Nov-2012 18:29

There are two issues here; one is the total accumulated data, the other how fast that data is growing.

As a young company we only have a modest amount of historical backup but that grows by sometimes several 100Gb a week. While our NAS setup works for now I can see a time in the not-so-distant-future when we'll have to look at other options.

DaveDog

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Ultimate Geek

#721507 22-Nov-2012 19:52

I work at a small advertising agency and we're currently reassessing our server/storage requirements. We currently have a dedicated file server running Linux (RAID5) which allows both our mac and windows clients to connect relatively easily - I won't say flawlessly because they don't.

We used to back up our data using AIT tapes, but recently the device has failed and we're currently backing up using a NAS device - and investigating Crashplan.

Not a huge user of massive amounts of storage - say 100-150Gb at best, but that's more due to diligent archiving and data management more than anything else.

gjm

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Ultimate Geek

#721524 22-Nov-2012 20:21

I would say there are only a handful of companies in NZ using petabytes. Im thinking the big utility companies or maybe the telcos. Maybe JohnR could weigh in and let us know about some of the storage VF are using.

All up in our enterprise we probably have about 30 terabytes of provisioned storage....would be much more if you just looked at the raw disk sizes but by the time you RAID things it gets small pretty quick.

[Amstrad CPC 6128: 128k Memory: 3 inch floppy drive: Colour Screen]

webfish

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#721548 22-Nov-2012 22:05

... grows by sometimes several 100Gb a week ...

Sorry - that should read up to 10Gb a week ... still adds up

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