backup solution incorporating windows/linux/apple/vmware environment

[ranjb]

Hi

I need to revisit our backup and DR strategy and i would be grateful for any suggestion on how best to use our existing kit.

This is our current kit and this is the plan:

backup kit hardware

Overland SNAP Server with 9tb usable RAID 5 storage with SATA disks. Software included was Netvault Bakbone with 500gb VTL.

4tb 2u custom built Freenas box

2tb Windows 2003 server utilising a perl backup script.

Currently the SNAP server is one of our main storage boxes, it serves out a variety of data such as various shared drives (e.g. staff, admin shared areas), iScsi target for home directories and profiles, use Microsoft iSCSI initator to do this and it also is a backup target for our apple XRAID data.

The FreeNas is a secondary backup location for our apple data and we also use it for archival storage.

The 2tb windows server is where all our Microsoft servers daily and weekly backups are stored. Its a combination of a perl script and XXcopy which runs on a daily/weekly basis which takes a copy of the data and dumps it to this server and it sorts in a nice format with dates and will delete the oldest copy automatically, will do 1 weeks worth mon-thu of critical data and then on weekend will do a whole backup of all shares on all our various windows servers and store it in a weekly folder. When we restore we simply open the server as a network drive, locate the file in a nice folder structure and drag and drop back to the live data.

problems with this setup and possible solutions

We currently do whole daily backups of data, and my knowledge of perl is limited. This is full backups and the backup windows are slowly increasing, it can take approx 5 hours to do a daily backup. Currently do this in the evening but can impact on performance for our VPN users.

A weekend backup with all the data takes approx 18 hours.

Once our SAN arrives the snap server will become a NAS box with all the backups, hope is to keep up to 4 weeks worth of data. I was thinking of Rsync to backup data as it will work similar to our perl script, Can this do incremental backups and erase older copies of backups? Is it known to be reliable or have other schools suffered problems? Would I best use the software designed for the SNAP server (bakbone netvault virtual tape library software) is very expensive to purchase APPROX 7K!!! if i want a 6tb VTL as well as plugins for exchange and SQL. I have looked at an alternative such as SEP Sesam which is approx 4k and seems to do more or less the same job. Does anyone recommend this?

The freenas box will continue to be used for a secondary backup of the MAC data and archival storage and the windows backup server is going to be located in a remote location and my plan is a weekly backup will be done onto the snap server and then NAS will send a secondary copy over to the windows server at a remote location. What do fellow members think of this, would there be a better way?

A lot of of our servers are being moved to VMware so need a backup solution to backup our virtual servers, can anyone recommend how I would do this? would it be best to use something like VCB?

Solutions I am currently thinking of is Rysnc, Bakbone Netvault, Sep Sesam, Retrospect?

Any recommendations? budget on backup/DR strategy is approx 5k.

Thanks you in advance.