Question : Problem: Next Level in backing up

We are JUST moving beyond normal backup hardware requirements. I've requested scopes and bids from our normal providers, however get the feeling that this moves into an area none of them really handle thus no bids. :[

We have always done a backup to hard drive as well as one to tape for off site storage. 5 days/week plus other backups on the weekends. We currently have an IBM LTO3 tape drive ( 400 gigs native ) and a Quantum S4 ( 800 gigs native ). We are using Backup Exec 11d and Bakbone Netvault ( at separate times ). Due to the fact that most of our data is JPEG's of job sites we get VERY little compression. I might get 880 gigs out of the S4 if lucky.

Our quarterly backup just topped 1.1 TB. I've heard hints of backup software that can back up more than one 'stream' at a time and other ideas to get this much data in a limited time frame. Could you point me in the right direction to resolve our time/size issues?


Paul

Answer : Problem: Next Level in backing up

If the speed of reading the data is the bottleneck, then a 10G network will not help. What is the backup rate at the moment? If you're not above 3GB/min then probably the network is not the problem.

If you only back up one big partition, made up of multiple high speed disks in a RAID volume, then using multiple data readers could help. CommVault Simpana does have that option. I'm not too sure about the other software packages. You could muliplex those multiple data streams to one tape drive. With CommVault you can also write the different data reader streams to multiple tape drives. I'm just not sure if the tape drives need to be attached to the same server or whether they can be attached to different servers.
Maybe you should look into CommVault Simpana. Expect it to be a steep learning curve when you're used to Backup Exec though :-).

With regards to D2D2T. In Backup Exec it's called a duplication job. That's not mirroring at all. You just back up to disk with Backup Exec, and then you run a duplication job that writes the data from the Backup to Disk device to tape.
When you speak about mirroring, maybe you're referring to the CPS option of Backup Exec.  That could indeed be described as slow mirroring.