I work in a small company which is getting bigger all the time. We have out grown our old backup system (a Small NAS box and Sugar Sync) and would like to move to something better...
We currently have 3 servers, 2 Win2k3 boxes and a 2k8 box. One of our servers is running SVN with all our code on it, and this is the most important machine to get backed up. We also have SQL boxes, Oracle instances and MySQL installed too...
I have been looking at offsite backup plans, and have been thinking about the following:
- Take all the machines we currently have and Virtualize them using the P2V tools in System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
- Have the VHDs stored on a Nexenta or Solaris machine using ZFS and iSCSI.
- Using ZFS's snapshot tools, we can take a snapshot of the instances while they are running and back them up to Amazon S3 or similar. then just backup the changes between nights.
- if a machine fails, just replace the physical box and add it to the HyperV pool. copy the VMs on (copy is not the right word, given the files are stored on iSCSI, but hopefully you know what i mean).
- As long as the SAN is built correctly, we should be ok for a disk failure (ZRAID or ZRAID2)
- since everything is backed up to S3, if we loose the office (Fire, Meteor Strike, Aliens, etc) we can get our data back (as long as Amazon still exists).
What do you think? Is this a feasible solution?
PS: advantage i just though of using ZFS: Data Deduplication should (in theory) mean we store less on the iSCSI box. If we upgrade all our machines to 2k8R2, we only need to store one real copy of it... the rest are de-duplicated...