Building a SAN Backup Solution

Greg Schuweiler

A little more than a year ago, I began searching for a solution to a problem I had yet to personally experience. Many organizations, especially those in the e-business environment, had information that was doubling, and in some cases tripling, in a single year. The systems administrators in those environments watched their backup windows disappear. Cold backups of databases no longer existed. Restoring a critical system after a disaster would be time consuming and complicated.

I work on a team of three UNIX systems administrators at a premier medical clinic, hospital, and research institute located in the midwest. Our information was not growing at the rate mentioned above, but databases that we considered static in size started growing. More applications were being developed in-house or were being purchased to run on UNIX servers. We started looking at upgrading our Fibre Channel (FC-AL) attached RAID arrays. During this process, we also decided to evaluate our backup infrastructure. To do this, we started a "UNIX Infrastructure Backup" project. The project consisted of evaluating all of our current backup processes, both manual and automatic. The next step was to design a system that would:

• grow along with disk storage needs

• move backups off the public Ethernet

• have a centralized point of control

• allow rapid disaster recovery

• keep the person on-call from being paged in the early morning hours.

After we reviewed what we wanted, or thought we needed, we put together a request for proposals.

About two-thirds of the systems we maintain were being backed up across the network to a shared tape library using Openvision; others were being backed up to a variety of locally-attached tape drives that consisted of DLT 4000, 8 mm, and 4 mm.