[Discuss] Revisiting VMWare ESX backup options

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

I think you need to compute the price per byte, and I agree with you
that tape is more cost effective. Although I might use removable disk
media if it were removable and would be stored. Also tapes are written
and read serially (with the exception of the ancient DECTapes). For
backup purposes, I also think that tapes are less accident prone. I know
a business where the computer operator who was supposed to backup disk
to disk, used the backup disk and overwrote the production disk. They
were down for a few days trying to rebuild their files, and they were a
major food distributor in Atlanta, and many restaurants get daily
deliveries. So, this caused a significant loss of business. BTW: This
was an NCR system if that matters.

On 10/29/2014 06:09 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On 10/29/2014 2:54 PM, Nathan Burridge wrote:
>> Have you looked into VMWare's Data Protection which is offered for free?
>
> Yeah... and I dismissed it based on the outright lies that make up the
> ad copy:
>
> "Traditional data backup and data recovery solutions are expensive,
> slow and complex."
>
> Fallacy 1: Expensive. No, they're not. A 16-slot rack-mount library
> costs around $4K. Most of that is the drive itself; the loader
> mechanism is cheap. LTO-6 cartridge prices have dropped to about $50
> each in bulk. That times 16 is $800 for each ~100TB of storage capacity.
>
> Fallacy 2: Slow. No. "Slow" isn't an absolute; it's relative to
> something else. Certainly, magtape is slower than most rotating
> platter media but that's irrelevant. It's part of a backup system. It
> doesn't need to be the fastest thing going. It needs to be reliable
> and the backup history depth needs to be scalable.
>
> Fallacy 3: Complex. This is all about horizontal scale. TSM is a
> complex system but it needs to be in order to handle literally
> thousands of simultaneous backup clients. A simple tape deck attached
> to a small database server is no more complex than the shell script
> that freezes the database, dumps it to disk, thaws the database, and
> writes the dump to tape.
>

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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