Hey guys,
I'm looking at upgrading our infrastructure and looking for some advice/feedback. We currently have a single SAN with 400GB of SSD and 12TB of RAID 6 drives for iSCSI. We are using Starwind on top of Windows 2008 and it works well. We then have a single ESXI 4.1 host connected via 4gbps bonded 1gbps ethernet (this works great). All backup solutions run within the VMs.
I've now got the budget to upgrade to a redundant SAN and host system and its probably worth looking at switching to a better backup solution. THe key I think is to choose the right SAN software. I want to have SAN software (not buy a ready made big $$ solution). I have heard about Nexenta and ZFS but they scare me a little. I don't need automatic failover (this usually costs a lot more) so maybe an Active/Passive setup where I could swap over in about 15 minutes would be fine.
In terms of backup I was thinking of something that could dedupe on the SAN and talk with the host directly to backup all VMs without agents on the VMs. I was looking at Veamm on a seperate VM so I can take advantage of deduplication between the sources and their backups.
What are peoples thoughts/comments on this?