Question : Problem: In need of disaster recovery solution.

I work with a school district and they are in need of a new backup solution.  They have 2 Windows NT 4.0 servers and 4 brand new Windows 2003 servers.  Between these there is a lot of critical data...  Exchange 2003, Healthmaster Nurse Software, Follett Library Automation, MMS Generations Attendance suite.

I believed that the hard drives in the servers came in mirrored, but I do not think this is so now.  Right now we are doing manual backups of the data to another server, just sort of copying and pasting.

I would like to really have a NAS drive and setup Acronis True Image Server to create an image every night of each server... some peace of mind is what I'm aiming for.

Does anybody have any recommendations as far as a brand of NAS, or technique for backing something like this up?

Thanks,

C.

Answer : Problem: In need of disaster recovery solution.

hi diablo-26,

tapes are still a viable long term solution.  They are specifically still used in the NYC area colleges and a NYC area high school (the ones that I know of personally).    sDLTs and DATs respectively.  They are also still widely used in the NYC financials; the models vary widely with requirements (of course).  

Spec wise you may be looking at a Dell PowerVault Tape Backup 122T to cover a school district's major app and then some. I can't really see a school system use anything bigger.  The only high priority app that would generate a huge volume of data with a delta would be email.

I am trying to determine the role of NAS as a image backup system in a school system.  NAS does have value as a ubiquitous storage system for any OS.  The two scenarios that I can see is
1. Server's system disk is mirrored which negates immediate failure in the 1st to 72nd hours; the NAS based server image will not be used in any active role and no down time.
2. Server's system disk has no RAID implementation, there is immenent failure in the 1st to 72 hours; system is down until server's system drives are replaced and reimaged to active functioning state.

School data located on the data drives will enjoy a similiar up-time scenario with RAID redundancy and tape backups.

Regards,