FreeNAS and Backup?

[ixxu]

I'm responsible for about ten servers mostly virtualized with ESXi(free), they all have local disks of different sizes, all together maybe 5-7TB. It is obvious you cannot do daily backups over 1Gbit Ethernet. This has to change, even if this worked for about 8 years with just minor problems.

I'm trying out FreeNAS just to make sure it fits my needs, and my first impression is good.

I want to implement 4Gbit FC into my servers with used hardware, since 4Gbit FC is really cheap on Ebay, still it would be roughly 4x faster than my current 1Gbit Ethernet.

So my plan is to connect those servers with FC to FreeNAS and to connect FreeNAS to some Drive-Enclosures like EMC² KTN-STL4.

I would like to connect a used TapeLibrary to FC as well, then my question is the following:

If I shut down all my virtual servers and stop the ESXis, take a snapshot with FreeNAS, restart all ESXis and all virtual servers, will I be able to backup this snapshot to a TapeLibrary and even more important, is this backup of any use, in case of a desaster? So if my Pool degrades and so all data is lost, can I restore this snapshot and had a working pool again?

How do I backup a snapshot to a TapeLibrary?

 

[Valdhor]

Bacula is an open source backup solution that works on FreeNAS. It is enterprise grade. If you don't want to go the open source route there are many other commercial backup solutions.

Hardware wise you can buy tape drives/libraries that are either FC or SAS. My particular library is a Dell TL2000 with a SAS LTO-4 drive. These are relatively cheap off of eBay but can only store 800GB per tape natively and have double compression (For files that can be compressed) so are listed as 800GB/1.6TB. For me the trade off between cost of tapes and tape capacity is about right with LTO-4. LTO-5 drives/libraries are way expensive and so are the tapes.

You can get drives that can contain higher densities per tape as well as libraries that can contain more tapes and drives. Writing to two or more tapes at the same time speeds up backups.

 

[ixxu]

Thank you very much for your answer. Of course I will go the open source way ;-) I don't want to pay money, if I just have to invest time to get the same result.

I will take a look into Bacula, I have to learn really a lot since I found FreeNAS, but in my very own opinion it is better to understand what I'm doing, and maybe doing some mistakes but call the technical hotline of a way too expensive company.