Remote Online Backups

grachel21

We have about 40 locations worldwide, with a typical data size of about 200 GB per location, with some up to 2 TB. Most sites have 1024 to 1536 Kb/s MPLS links, with a few 2 Mb/s and one 4.5 Mb/s. Central data center has two 45 Mb/s links.

We are looking to remote, online backups to our data center from each location. I'm wondering which products and processes have worked.

Has anybody successfully implemented remote, online backups of Windows servers across their WAN to a central data center?

Brian Donahue

Hi,

SQL Backup can backup your SQL Server databases across a network, provided your destination presents itself as either a drive letter (ie a SAN, not a mapped drive!) or a network share. Typically you keep your SQL Server backups separate from file backups -- the two don't play well. Unless the database is using the SIMPLE recovery model, you can't just backup your SQL Server's (MDF,LDF) files.

For instance, in the full recovery model, the backup data needs to be requested from the SQL Server using a BACKUP DATABASE or BACKUP LOG command.

For files, you will typically want a third-party backup solution like Backup Exec, Arcserve, or Retrospect, that has an open file backup agent. Windows comes with NTBACKUP, which can also back up open files, but the capabilities of that are pretty limited as far as devices and scheduling.

justjasb

Today, data is the lifeline for organizations, and any unplanned downtime affects the company’s bottom line. To reduce length and downtime cost during outage, organizations are building infrastructures to reduce RTO and RPO. This approach allows them to compress backup windows, increase the frequency of backups and, when necessary, restore their data quickly and efficiently.

davissteve87

A suggestion I tend to favor for Windows is putting in a DFS (or similar) solution where by all data as Remote Site A is replicated (bit by changed bit) back to a DFS in the data center. We're using a home-grown similar solution for our Linux / Unix replication here. Come backup time you just grab the local datacenter copy.

We looked at a Data Domain appliance (and replication) also to de-dupe the data locally then send it across the wire for backup to tape / keep offsite. The appliance fills the gap where a local copy of the data is available, but adding an extra box (even a "cheap" appliance) would definitely be more expensive.