Need backup Solution for Server

[Majestic]

I've just had a request from a client in an environment with about 30 workstations and 3 Servers (microsoft server 2008 and 2003) for a backup solution.

They've asked me for both the software and the hardware solution. I'm not sure whether to suggest tapes (which they have mentioned in the request) or hard drives. They would like it as easy as possible in a configuration where they can just switch the drive or the tape everyday.

In terms of size my best guess would be about... 40 - 60 gigs max. I don't think it's more than that since the company does mostly database entry.

I believe they would only be backing up their databases I still have to find out to what extent they would be backing up the workstations since a lot of them are still being migrated from home xp -> win 7 pro.

In any case, any suggestions would be greatly appreicated. I realize that there must be a huge difference in price between 40 - 60 and 100 gigs in terms of storage.

Thanks very much,

Majestic

 

[cyabro]

With the price of HDDs these days that's what I would go for and stay away from tape.

I've got a couple of clients with similar setup to yours and I've set them up with ShadowProtect.
ShadowProtect have a version for Windows Server & Windows Small Business Server so you need to make sure you get the correct one.
You will need a copy for each server and it isn't cheap but it is the best at what it does - Easy backup & restore

What I've done is put an internal 1TB SATA HDD into one of the servers (you could put it in any machine on the network if you want) and setup ShadowProtect on each server to backup to a seperate folder on the that 1TB HDD.
ShadowProtect comes with a free program called ImageManager, which you also install on the machine that you put the 1TB HDD in, and configure it to mirror the backup folders to an external USB HDD (I typically use 3x500GB or 3x1TB) which can then be taken offsite.
3 USB drives is all you really need as you have one onsite connected to the server, one offsite and one in transit and you just rotate them.

ShadowProtect does full system image backups so you can use the backups to do a bare metal restore if one of the servers fails.

For the workstations you could setup folder redirection for the My Documents and Desktop folders to one of the servers (Much like you can do with SBS2003-2011) that way you have all the workstations data as well.
Backing emails could be a but trickier unless they are running exchange or similar on one of the servers.

 

[pceinc]

Do you have a budget to work with? I would recommend Shadow Protect with a 1TB mirrored NAS like the WD Mybook II at a minimum. What OS's are the 3 servers running? Shadow Protect for SBS is cheaper ($599 msrp) than Shadow Protect for Standard Server ($899 msrp. You'll need a license for each server. The NAS will cost about $210.

Do you provide managed services? This may be a good opportunity to "get your foot in the door" with a Backup & Disaster Recovery Solution. We charge $400-$600 per month (3yr contact) for this service to clients with this number of workstations and servers. This includes the hardware, software, monitoring, and restores. You need to size the client up to see if it is a fit. What state would their operations be in if on or more of the servers failed? Do they expect you to perform a magical restore and have them back up and running within hours or are they okay with a disaster recovery process that may take 1 or more days?

I would recommend not selling solution that has a human element to it. Someone will always forget to insert a tape, or the tape changer leaves the business and no one else realizes they are supposed to pickup this person's duties. It happens.

 

[Knightsman]

Checkout GFI Backup, it will do everything you want, without any interaction from them, unless they want to add or remove files to the backup set.

 

[ITMAN]

Mozy Pro, offsite, and includes option FREE to local backup as well to disk

 

[nesrinamb]

I would recommend shadow protect but like other users have said it is expensive but it does a great job.

When it comes to the hardware side of things I would use a hard drive wth some type of raid

 

[controlfreak]

I also use shadow protect but I highly recommend before using it to read all the white paper material available on their site regarding setting up a server to work seamlessly with shadow protect as if you have exchange or sql and do not setup your environment correctly doing an HIR restore can be very painful.

Give them a call as well they have seminars come through my town once or twice a year for free that gives great information on using the product. You can also pay for the recovery course that runs at the same time.

 

[nesrinamb]

Yes if you do go with shadow protect you should thoroughly read their manuals. If the back up is done correctly then the down time when a server goes down will be minimal and the virtual feature is great if you need to access to files right away.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

Not to diminish what some of you already know but Small Business Administration says that 90% of small- under $10 million annual sales companies who have a catastrophic lose of data will fail within 2-3 years. I like to start with that when I am consulting a client. Lets get the importance on the table. What is your company worth to you?

You need more information.

What type of client? Retailers, wholesalers, Mfgr, law, insurance, accountants or what? Everyone's data is important but with some companies, what they do and sell is information take law, accounting, and insurance for example. Then still overtakers have trust relationships with clients to keep documents for them.

How quickly do they need full recovery in the event of a failure? Murphy s law says a failure will happen at the absolute worst time. Do you need your servers up again in 2 hours or 24 hours? or a few days? This effects the cost of the solution.

How many off site backups do they require? Daily or weekly?

How big is the required backup. In the most general sense there are three types of data backed up: Critical, Nice to have and everything. Sometimes you have different backups when the backups are extremely large so that you can manage the expense and still meet objectives. Meaning that say some office docs might be backed up from workstations to servers to internal HD backups while other data gets migrated to optical backups and goes to the bank vault.

Optical is nice as you have unlimited off site copies of old backups. If you find some errors in the file that go back weeks you can go back and get the last clean data with only the cost of reentry of the last weeks files.

I like rotating an off site copy at least weekly and some times nightly depending on the client.

Be careful not to go cheap here as only server specific backup software can backup a 24x7 database. You must do them manually, Otherwise a script must be written to stop the database service close the file and back it up and then restart the service.

Some databases will export the database without closing so that the data file export can be backed up without stopping and starting the database.

Are they running scsi drives, sata? Which raids are they running on the three servers? This gives you some hints as to how they value their data.

Are these three new servers state of the art or one decent one and two pieces of junk? Sometimes you start with upgrading the servers so they are less likely to fail to begin with. Why put a spare on a 400,000 mile truck driving into the desert for a critical job?

One problem with doing backup to internal backup drives is that you need to be able to have an off site backup that is reasonably current in case of lightning, fire, flood, tornado, earthquake or theft of the whole system or terrorism or employee vandalism.

The problem with the inexpensive online backups is that when you need to do a restore they can take 7 days or longer. I had a lawyer client find this out the hard way a few months back.

I think I would be leaning towards an optical backup system and rotating the complete backups off site no less than once a week.

I would also sell a service to do a test restore at least once a month. Any backup system is only as good as its test restores prove it to be.

Other items if they need ultra fast recovery then it is nice to have a backup software like Acronis or some of the HP stuff allows universal restore to any hardware. This is important as you can source any workstation in the short term (when you can't get the old server going quickly) to get you back going again then when the newly ordered server (parts) arrives again back it up and restore it to the new hardware. This works very nifty.

I don't know if I left anything out but this is a short list that needs to be gone over with the client.

I learned long ago not to empathize with the clients budget when doing a free needs analysis. Always recommend the correct solution, no matter what the cost, when they ask for something less then if there is ever a problem you can remind them that they opted for the cheaper solution so not to direct their anger towards you.

When they ask for budget solutions you always give this qualifier "This is not the ideal solution, I have reservations recommending it but it fits your budget." and include the best option.

 

[Majestic]

I called up Storagecraft (Shadow Protect) and spoke with them. Definitely too expensive even with the reseller 20% discount. I have 3 servers to backup and it would be about $800 each my cost, $999 per server otherwise.

I'm looking at Handy Backup, GFI Backup, Acronis and Easeus Server backup. How well do these fair compared to Shadow Protect? I want to make sure I have something that allows my client to recover fairly quickly in a disaster case.

Budget wise I'm thinking my client does not want to spend much more than $1,500 in software and equipment. I confirmed that they need 1 TB max and that would be fine, and for 3 servers (2 server 2008, 1 terminal server).

Any more info would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks all for your help

Majestic

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

That is a tough one. I have always like hp backup exec as far as software goes. They sell it with or without hardware. It is cheaper to buy their hardware solutions with the software than it is to buy someone else's hardware and pay full price for the software.

They have a product that is called universal restore. This is handy to load the server on a different piece of equipment if you have troubles and cannot restore to the identical box.

 

[krtechsolutions]

It sounds like to me you just doing a basic on site backup job, if that is the case

Look into a buffalo nas, most of there business model nas come with a backup software called novastor and it will do what you want it to.

If you customer is on a budget then they will not get off site backups plan and simple.

A real dr plan cost money, I have designed many backup solutions

Ranging from using ntbackup to full blown DR plans that included 2 large nas that replicated across the Internet and could bring up a virtual machine in minutes both on site or locally

You have to ask yourself and your client.

What are they trying to prevent from? Hardware failure, employees deleting things, fires, natural disasters, etc.

If simply human error and hardware failure then a on site backup will work if no then they are looking to spend so money sure you can use mozy or other online backups but do they really work if the building burnt down? They are simple file backups programs to me and pretty worthless.

If you want to talk more or need help or advice shoot me a pm and I will gladly chat with you on the phone.

Thanks
Rich

 

[BimmiN]

Not to diminish what some of you already know but Small Business Administration says that 90% of small- under $10 million annual sales companies who have a catastrophic lose of data will fail within 2-3 years. I like to start with that when I am consulting a client. Lets get the importance on the table. What is your company worth to you?
.......

I agree here...
With all of our larger corporate clients we were doing nightly differential backups with full backups on Fridays that would then go offsite for a month with full backups every four weeks that would go offsite forever.
This way we always had a differential tape in the drive to do immediate restores on files that someone had accidentally deleted etc. If the place burnt down we could do a full restore from the previous Friday. If something came up (eg: a court case) a year later about something that hadn't been handled correctly we could restore a file system back the way it was from March of 2008 if we wanted.
We used Backup Exec which is nice and straightforward.

 

[sys-eng]

I agree here...
With all of our larger corporate clients we were doing nightly differential backups with full backups on Fridays that would then go offsite for a month with full backups every four weeks that would go offsite forever.
This way we always had a differential tape in the drive to do immediate restores on files that someone had accidentally deleted etc. If the place burnt down we could do a full restore from the previous Friday. If something came up (eg: a court case) a year later about something that hadn't been handled correctly we could restore a file system back the way it was from March of 2008 if we wanted.
We used Backup Exec which is nice and straightforward.

I beleive the statistic is 80%+ of the small businesses close whether they have data loss or not.

The Symantec software is good but way too expensive for this case. He is probably limited to less than $400 in software.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

I beleive the statistic is 80%+ of the small businesses close whether they have data loss or not.

The Symantec software is good but way too expensive for this case. He is probably limited to less than $400 in software.

That is another figure.

80% of all new start ups fail within 5 years regardless. Restaurants are 90% failure.

But even if you escape that stat and you have a catastrophic unrecoverable data and system failure then you put yourself back into that high failure rate about 50% again even if you are a 10 year established business.