Backup and Recovery Setup

I recently designed and implemented a backup/recover solution for a small hedge fund. They were using Veritas Backup Exec, a Quantum P50 DLT (or something). Brick level backups were being done on the Exchange server and everything was being backed up over the LAN.

As everybody does, our backup and restore times were not meeting SLAs. I performed an analysis and ended up bringing in EMC Networker, Data Domain, EMC Replication Manager, Kroll On-track and ESX Ranger.

This solution allowed me to backup large data sets on the SAN using Replication Manager, it allowed for fast backups and restores with the ability to store around 50 TB of data on 4 TB of disk using Data Domain and the EMC Networker software, although harder to learn, is enterprise class.

Backing up virtual machines is cake. ESX Ranger snaps them off and puts them on Data Domain.

All Data Domain is replicated to our DR site.

No more slow brick level backups of Exchange. By using Replication Manager to clone to the backup server, we backup the Exchange database files in their interity. Replication Manager also truncates the logs when the backup completes.

What if we want to restore one mailbox? Using Kroll Ontrack we can look into the EDB files, choose the mailbox we want to restore and restore it to a PST.

SLAs are met, restores are quick and now I sit back on move on to the next project.