Hello, again! You may recall my earlier question to the list, included below. I've now talked with my other coworkers who work with servers and they've agreed to go with amanda for our new backup system.
Now I'd like to get some hardware recommendations. I'm mostly unsure about what we'll need in terms of capacity, both for processing power and for storing the actual backups. Less interested in specific model or part numbers, because it will need to come from one of our approved vendors, of course, and most likely by way of a formal tender process - but I can say that we almost always end up buying complete Dell rackmount systems. The basic parameters I'm working with are: - Backing up around 75 servers (mostly Debian, with a handful of other linux distros and a handful of windows machines). - Total amount of data to back up is currently in the 40 TB range. - Everything is connected by fast (10- or 100-gigabit) networks. - Backup will be to disk/vtapes. - I've been asked to have backups available for the previous 6 months. - I'm assuming that the best way to handle backup of windows clients will be to mount the disk on a linux box and back it up from there, although some of them are virtual machines, so doing a kvm snapshot and backing that up instead would also be an option. Given all that, how beefy of a box should I be looking at, and how much disk space can I expect to need? Also, as a side note, I'm planning on using VDO (Virtual Data Optimizer) to provide on-the-fly data compression and deduplication on the backup server, which should reduce disk consumption at the cost of CPU overhead. I'm thinking it would make the most sense to use VDO only for the filesystem holding the vtapes, and not for the staging area, but feel free to correct me on that. On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 08:19:58AM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote: > Howdy, all! > > We've recently had some problems at work with our backup provider, so my > boss has come to me and requested a recommendation for bringing backups > in-house. I've previously adminned a small amanda installation back in > 2000-2006 and I quite liked the system and how it works, so that was my > first thought. > > I've done some general web searches and it looks like the situation > today isn't as good as it was a decade and a half ago - not a lot of > active development, limited support for Windows clients, etc. But, on > the other hand, amanda was already a very mature system back then, so I > don't know that a lot of ongoing development would still be needed. > > So let's see what the current users have to say. Is a new amanda > installation still a sane choice in 2020? > > My use case is that I'll be backing up somewhere in the neighborhood of > 75ish servers, a mix of physical and (mostly) virtual machines, and a > mix of mostly Linux with some Windows and one or two FreeBSD. Total > disk usage is currently in the 35-40 TB range, growing by maybe 1-2 TB > per year. Aside from my own positive experiences with amanda, both I > and my boss (and most of my coworkers) are very pro-open-source. > > If amanda isn't a reasonable choice for that scenario, what would be a > better option? > > And what kind of hardware specs should I be looking at? Is tape still > king, or is everyone backing up to hard drives now? > > -- > Dave Sherohman -- Dave Sherohman
