An Example of Backing Up Client Systems to OSVault Servers

In our office, we use a tape-based OSVault server as the destination for our system backups. That OSVault server uses a Qualstar 66-slot, LTO-3 tape library with two drives that we purchased several years ago. It has 4TBytes of spinning disk in a RAID-6 configuration. The backup programs we use (Toucan and Simple Backup Suite) can backup our systems to disk storage and are open-sourced, so they meet our needs adequately.

The structure of our offices is that our servers are located in our Datacenter in downtown Denver, but very few people actually work at the data center. Most work out of other offices with high-speed Internet links. So, the backups were initially setup to write directly to the OSVault server over our company VPN.

We found several limitations with that setup. The first was that the backups needed to be throttled at times, so that other Internet activity (web and VOIP for example) weren't degraded. Also, we found that we were transferring A LOT of data every day, usually at night. A full backup from one employee laptop could exceed 250GBytes.

Our solution was to put a small InfiniDisc system in the office as the backup destination. Those InfiniDisc systems generally have 500GBYtes or 1000GBytes of RAID-1 storage and can receive data at around 50MBytes/second, versus the 1MBytes/second direct Internet links. So, backups ran quickly to the InfiniDisc, then the InfiniDisc system would move the resulting backup at a reduced data rate to the OSVault server. The little InfiniDisc servers cost less than $650 each.

After a couple of years of doing this, we have found the solution works well for us. The costs are very low (less than 3 cents per gigabyte stored) and we get some great advantages:
- We get disk-to-disk-to-tape backup without any licensing costs for a traditional tape backup solution
- We have our most recent backup on the local InfiniDisc for quick restore on a Gigabit Ethernet network
- We don't have to move our incremental backups to the OSVault server, reducing Internet usage
- We have remote access anywhere to our backups stored on the OSVault server
- We can expand out storage capability anytime simply by adding more LTO-3 tape cartridges
- And, its a set-and-forget setup