What sort of backup strategy do corporations use?

[jondeker]

Can any IT people, or anyone who knows, comment on what sorts of backup strategy/policy you use or seen at other big businesses?

How many local copies? How many off-site copies? Versioning? How often? Raid? Tape? etc

I was wondering to what extent businesses go to protect their data.

 

[Fallen Kell]

We do weekly full backups to tape, with nightly incremental backups. A monthly full backup is made and shipped off-site to a secure data storage facility (out of state and in a nuclear bomb shelter). We also have two "local" sites in which tapes are stored (2 different data centers in two different buildings but both of which use the same backup software, Legato Networker, and same tape format). Tapes are rotated between the two local sites bi-monthly. I believe the current tape vaults can keep several months of backups online and ready to be restored. Older data would require that the tape(s) be loaded into one of the two local vaults.

 

[mtnd3vil]

Right now, my organization has some extreme problems with the backup process. We have almost no backups.

What we are setting up over the next two months will be Microsoft System Center 2010 Data Protection manager pointed at an HP D2D appliance that will replicate itself to a second appliance on site but a half mile away. It will also replicate to a third appliance about 40 miles away.

Deduplication will stretch the backup retention to about four weeks and backups will be nightly. D2D only, no tapes. Appliances will be RAID 5 or 6 with 12 2TB SATA drives.

Size of organization is 8,000 employees.

Desktop backups are handled differently and the end result is single copy onsite only with zero retention, last backup only, profile data only. Storage solution is two raid 5 appliances spanned together as one volume.

 

[Emulex]

D2D backups full of all machines (bare metal full VSS) that are not servers nightly to one storage server super high compression separate AES256+ encryption keys - AD security - weekdays only 3 copies retained
D2D Weekend backups to secondary storage server for offsite weekly.

All servers are VM's protected by VEEAM which does its dedupe/compression pretty reasonably - (1.5TB to 350gb) - jobs are interleaved between storage devices and taken offsite weekly.

SQL dumps (compressed) daily off-site along with very particular other files (very small) to another D2D set; every weekday; to a different destination in case.

It's probably in your best interest to have a good bit of distance from your retention destinations since a large fire? tornado? nuke? might result in destruction of critical data.

It's a real pita as you get more and more complex - but the fact that you can 7zip a monstrous file and par2 it onto consumer 2TB(or 3TB) drives - you have an extremely cheap source of storage since more than 1 complete copy can be stored on a drive that can (in bulk) cost as cheap as 1 or 2 tapes.

I've got a ton of powerful new san waiting to go up - with all that nifty asynchronous snapshot replication - just need some time to get it up - but that is not an excuse for backups. n:n replication and vmware FT.

I'm not a big fan of incrementals - kind of like RAID-5 it's not really that much better than raid-10 - you save some money but dang i've had 2 simultaneous drive failures in my life - that is two disasters that were avoided by paying a bit more. and the speed.

 

[alaricljs]

I'm on the development side of one of the biggest software developers. We backup only data (source code, DB contents that can't be recreated). Weekly full backup, daily incremental, 90 day retention all to VTL (disk). If it's really important then the backup is replicated to another site at least 1 time zone away. All the data being backed up is already replicated to other sites for availability reasons to begin with.

The only thing we use tape for is escrow.

 

[Davidh373]

I know normally companies have servers that they either manually sync or that automatically sync. What I have set up is what I imagine is similar. I have two local backups, 1 external drive, and two drives in the computer, and a server set up locally (which I'd imagine a corporation would have off site).

 

[taltamir]

corporations use whatever their boss was sold...
most business are not market leaders, they are merely average and small time... because of mis-management... so most use overpriced crap that was sold to the ignorant boss by a slick tongued salesman.
But the more serious ones have capable enough bosses to either know stuff themselves, or get someone who actually knows what they are doing to make such decisions.

bottom line is, it varies.

 

[Emulex]

most people just need a bmw - two or three (dl380 G7 pimped) DAS
esx essentials
veeam
(maybe a management pc)
two switches
integrated service router (or separate)
reasonable power and cooling.

that probably covers companies up to $50+ MIL a year if provisioned right - add a few more servers and small san if you need FT.

i'm really frugal in my recommendations - buy good hardware and hypervisor and backup and the rest of your money will go towards microsoft licensing.

time is money - downtime is money lost - most businesses that suffer catastrophic loss of data fail (94&#37