December 2, 2009 at 6:35 am
it takes me 5 minutes to eject a tape when the guy comes from the off-site vendor. i even have a separate policy in netbackup so that all monthly backups have their own set of tapes so that it won't screw up a restore
we bought an HP MSL 8096 tape library earlier this year with 2 LTO-4 drives. each tape officially holds 800GB uncompressed and 1.6TB compressed. but i was surprised to find a lot of my tapes hold close to 3TB of data and the people in the Symantec forums said it's normal since they advertise the compression ratio on the low end. 100 LTO-4 tapes cost us around $5300. Right now we have close to 50 tapes that either haven't been used yet or have expired images because i keep differentials for 1 month.
Next year LTO-5 is coming out where the storage density is doubled and we'll probably buy a drive. it will enable us to send all our backups to off-site rather than just 20 or so of the most critical databases. we can send all our backups off-site but we don't want to use the 2-3 tapes it will take. LTO-5 will enable us to do it on one tape.
our weekly full backups are around 5TB and another 5TB for archive databases we backup once every few months
we had an old DLT-4 robot that went EOL earlier this year and that gave us problems since each tape was only 80GB compressed and the speed was like watching trees grow. with the new hardware our slowest link is a lot of the clients aren't on gig-e. with LTO-4 we're even backing up data we don't really care about since 3TB for $55 per tape is not a big deal. i don't even care that some of my differentials are over 200GB of data.
the old DLT-4 we used to buy 200 tapes or so for $20000 to $25000 and was always a major approval headache. LTO-4 is a 20 to 1 ratio and comes out to $550 for 10 tapes.
August 14, 2015 at 8:37 am
I hate all third party software for backing up SQL Server databases. The technology is matured a lot now though but I just don't see any added value to *buy* third party softwares which can very easily be replaced by having good DBA skills, fast storage and great native backup features SQL Server already has (did I mention even Standard edition allows compression?).
Anyone who has explored all T-SQL Switches in backup command would know free features are better than emptying pockets for a third party.
If I am a DBA and backup team comes up with suggestions and paint a rosy picture about their great backup software, I would ask ate least following questions:
how does it backup sql server? any agents need to be installed on all servers?
What happens if backup server fails or needs to be updated?
Proprietary format for backup files and it's own storage?
How do i backup just one database that failed? do i have to run the whole job even for one db backup failure?
Justification of extra cost of not using native backups and using 3rd party instead?? SAN storage only? features? speed?
convenience?
how does it handle encrypted backups?
Is reporting free?
checksums while backing up to prevent backups of corrupted data?
August 14, 2015 at 8:38 am
Oh! and of course what happens to poor old Log Shipping? Do you have a solid DR in your stupid expensive 3rd party?
August 14, 2015 at 8:47 am
maddy192 (8/14/2015)
I hate all third party software for backing up SQL Server databases. The technology is matured a lot now though but I just don't see any added value to *buy* third party softwares which can very easily be replaced by having good DBA skills, fast storage and great native backup features SQL Server already has (did I mention even Standard edition allows compression?).Anyone who has explored all T-SQL Switches in backup command would know free features are better than emptying pockets for a third party.
If I am a DBA and backup team comes up with suggestions and paint a rosy picture about their great backup software, I would ask ate least following questions:
how does it backup sql server? any agents need to be installed on all servers?
What happens if backup server fails or needs to be updated?
Proprietary format for backup files and it's own storage?
How do i backup just one database that failed? do i have to run the whole job even for one db backup failure?
Justification of extra cost of not using native backups and using 3rd party instead?? SAN storage only? features? speed?
convenience?
how does it handle encrypted backups?
Is reporting free?
checksums while backing up to prevent backups of corrupted data?
if you need a restore from say a year or two ago you go into your backup software, pick the date range and it gives you the images, you select the one you want, set the options for the server and file paths to restore to and it does the rest.
all the backup software out there supports backup of the catalog which can be restored. no big deal. and all the SQL agents support all the MS SQL options like checksums, compression, etc.
August 14, 2015 at 8:53 am
maddy192 (8/14/2015)
Oh! and of course what happens to poor old Log Shipping? Do you have a solid DR in your stupid expensive 3rd party?
you can do log shipping, third party backup, DR, etc all at the same time. these problems have been solved many years ago
August 14, 2015 at 9:46 am
Although I'm not crazy about our Netapp snap manager for sql backup/restore solution, I do know that a native sql backup of our largest prod database takes at least six hours.
The snap mirror backups take seconds and restores just minutes. We don't do log shipping but there is now a desire to have an always on availability group solution on top of what we have, with a "replica" kept on servers in another state.
So I'm going to have to figure how/if that can be done without breaking the current backups or adding to much load to the prod/primary cluster.
August 14, 2015 at 1:01 pm
Indianrock (8/14/2015)
Although I'm not crazy about our Netapp snap manager for sql backup/restore solution, I do know that a native sql backup of our largest prod database takes at least six hours.The snap mirror backups take seconds and restores just minutes. We don't do log shipping but there is now a desire to have an always on availability group solution on top of what we have, with a "replica" kept on servers in another state.
So I'm going to have to figure how/if that can be done without breaking the current backups or adding to much load to the prod/primary cluster.
there are two kinds of third party backup apps. native and disk/san based. native ones like netbackup or commvault will use the MS API's and the backup app is there to handle scheduling, catalog management and centralizing the process.
the SAN ones do the same but a lot of them seem to look at the disk bytes rather than use the native API's. or they are limited by being linked to the vendor's SAN where they don't support all the product's API's. we looked at our SAN vendor's app recently and the first thing i did was make a list of limitations, and it was a big list. the native API based apps don't suffer from this
August 14, 2015 at 1:11 pm
You mean SQL Server native DR methods or backup software based DR (which probably leverages SQL Server APIs)?
August 14, 2015 at 1:32 pm
yes, the SAN vendors will do SQL DR but it's based on scanning their disk volumes for changes. at least it seems that way from the documentation.
for backup you can do DR but you have to use a disk based backup app that replicates data to a DR site for restore. i prefer to use native SQL DR and a third party app to back it up because i don't want to have to manage the scheduling on 30 different servers as well as pray that all the files are there on disk going back months or years and not deleted.
August 14, 2015 at 2:43 pm
Months and years !? Didn't know people kept .trn files for more than 24 hours on secondary sites !
August 14, 2015 at 2:58 pm
Not the logs but full backups
August 14, 2015 at 3:10 pm
I keep them (full and log) for 5 days to allow me to do a PIT recovery to any point in that time period. It's worked well for me.
And I use native SQL backups for everything. It's free, there's certainly no shortage of people who know how to take them and recover from them and it can all be done right from T-SQL.
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