I too looked at that, and the pricetag is really, really high.
I have a StorageTek BladeStore BC84, and I looked at the very same thing. http://www.storagetek.com/products/product_page1.html
Software price, product compatibility became a serious issue.
So, I went with a tape library with 20 LTO2 tape slots, and expandability to two drives. http://www.storagetek.com/products/product_page23.html
I am currently getting Bacula running on this, but when it does run I can post my DIR config to help others.
What I am doing is just going to backup my multi-terabyte storagearray over the network, my bacula host server running the DIR and SD are connected via gigabit ethernet to the host storage servers that host the filesystems on the storage array.
But the real beauty is I am going to be making backups of offline data!
The storage array is capable of making hot snapshots of existing volumes, which will then be mounted by a different server with the FD, and then backed up, and then brought offline, discarded, tapes changed in the library, and then new snapshots made, mount, backup, dismount, discard, repeat.
If anyone else is doing this, can you let us know? I would really not like to re-invent the wheel.
Cheers! Chris
Arno Lehmann wrote:
Hi,
Albrecht Jacobs wrote:
Hi there,
we are about to implement a SAN (Storage Area Network) at our office based on Apples technology (Mac OS X, XSAN). I am now looking for a backup solution (currently I am using AMANDA).
Bacula works with MacOS X - at least I know that fthe FD does on 10.3. It only needed a ./configure --with-options; make; make install so I see no problems with the SD or DIR as well... after all, for GUI-less daemon processes, OS X is a Unix/FreeBSD system.
How about SAN support in Bacula (the backup data goes from the storage device over the SAN to the backup device without passing the backup-, storage- or file-server)? Or virtual tape libraries?
No, sorry.
No direct SAN support to my knowledge.
I guess it would be possible to implement a FD for a SAN device, but I don't know of any existing implementation of that. Backup directly from storage to storage is quite impossible - after all, a backup is not only moving data but, equally important, lots of book-keeping. Bacula can't work without it's book keeping, and that requires the three deamons.
Virtual tape libraries... never tried that, but depending of their interface, these could work. I was thinking about Quantums DX series some time ago, but I decided that a "normal" tape device (single drive or autochanger) with a big enough spool space would be the better solution.
It seems that these features are really expensive (it looks like we have to spend over 4000 Euros for software licences).
Yup. Plus the hardware, of course.
And, of course, there's still some software between storage and backup media, even if you don't see it.
Depending on your needs, implementing backups with an extra server or two for FD/SD/DIR/database and using bacula might be a better solution. Warranty would be one very important point, less devices and processes another, but when money matters...
Arno
Any comments are appreciated.
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