How many backup servers do I need?

This has got to be the worst question that I can get asked because I don't have a direct answer. I always tell people "It depends" which sounds like a cop out but it is true. It depends on a lot of factors such as:

• How much data are you backing up?
• How fast is your production storage to send the data to the backup server?
• How fast is your media server\proxy server to be able to process the data it is getting?
• How fast is your network to handle the flow of data (unless doing LAN-free backups)?
• How fast is your target storage for the backup files (doing disk-to-disk backups)?
• How fast is your network from the media server\proxy server to your target storage?
• How much data are you backing up each night?
• How often are you doing full backups?
• Are you doing active fulls or synthetic fulls?
• How big is your backup window?
• Is it ok to have your backups overflow into production hours?
• Do you need to backup using application agents?
• Are you backing up physical or virtual?
• If virtual are you using image-based backup solutions to get the VM?
• If virtual are you using VMware technologies like Change Block Tracking?
• It all comes down to "how fast can your infrastructure go?"

You can relate this question to one in your personal life when someone asks "How long is it going to take you to get there?" Well you can give a rough estimate, but there are many things to take into consideration, what is the rate of travel, what is the traffic like, which streets are you going to take, are you going to take a bike or your car or a bus or are you going to walk? All of these are similar to your backups. It depends on the mode at which your going to get your data from point A to point B and how congested is that route?

Now it gets much easier when these questions are answered and the more information you give us the more detailed response you'll get. But nothing beats good 'ol testing. Test your environment. See how long it takes to back up one server, ok see how long it takes to do that incremental, ok now see how long it takes to backup two servers at the same time. When running things in parallel in the IT world it is not a linear improvement. Running one backup might take 30 minutes, running two backups might take 35 minutes and running three backups might take 45 minutes. There will definitely be a point of diminishing returns and that is where testing will prove to have paid off. You will get to a point where it takes you longer to back up than if you backed off one or two servers and waited for the one of them to finish running. Where that point is is entirely up to your hardware, most likely it is not the software. Most backup software these days are built for multi-threading and to utilize the resources as efficiently as possible but you can't magically squeeze more out of your hardware that what its capacity is. Now some products offer compression and deduplication that will allow you to technically send more data than others.

I hope you enjoyed my little lesson here. It is something I learned when I came to the dark side (more on this later).

Hello, Hello, Is this thing on?

Most people start off with their first post as a hello or welcome message. Welcome. Hello.

Ok, enough of that, you didn't come here for me to say hello to you. You came here because you go lost somewhere and stumbled upon this post. No problem, I'll take 'em any way I can get 'em.

I enjoy sharing my knowledge that I've learned over the past 10+ years of being in IT and the 6+ years of working with virtualization. I started out on Windows 2000 in the enterprise, worked a little on upgrading NT4 to 2000. I've worked with DOS and Windows 3.0 and up, but I really got into the enterprise in the Windows 2000 days. Since then I have touched many pieces of the Enterprise IT Infrastructure from AD\DNS\DHCP to AV to Backups to Storage to Servers to Networking to Patches to some off-the-wall applications. I used to be a "Jack of all trades, master of none." I started to focus in on a specific technology when I learned Citrix Metaframe (aka Winframe, Metaframe Presentation Server, Presentation Server, XenApp, I think Citrix's product has had more names than Prince). I worked with Citrix WinMetaPresentationApp for a few years and got certified and deployed it and managed it in large environments and then this really cool technology came out called virtualization. VMware GSX.

After that I started learning this new cool technology and started focusing in on that and became entrenched in it and started to specialize in it. I'm glad I did because it has got to be one of the most disruptive technologies in IT. I really don't think that there would be this high pressure on Intel and AMD to up their core counts so much if it weren't for virtualization. Now I am slowly starting to learn Hyper-V because the company I work for is now supporting Hyper-V in its products.

It is really funny thinking about this because in the old days before my time there were these things called mainframes that worked in a way that you had the main processing done on a main centralized computer and then you had dummy terminals. These main computers also did this fancy thing called virtualization (vpars) where you split up the whole computer into different segments to perform different tasks. Its weird how things come full circle. We go from a mainframe central computer with dummy terminals that does virtualization to the server\desktop model and back to the central computer with dummy terminals running on virtualization. The only difference is now we are doing it on commodity x86. Now with cloud it has taken that same concept to a whole new level.

I am going to try and write in here as much as I can, at least once a week if not more. The point of this is to share my knowledge and little tidbits that I come across in my day to day adventures. Most of the stuff will be around virtualization and backup, but I may come across a great nugget that pertains to something else. I will also talk about some great products that I find as well. I am a manufacturers best friend because if I find something good I am going to talk about, I've had people ask me before if I work for that company or if I am getting kickbacks from that company. No, I just enjoy sharing my knowledge and when I find something that makes my life easier it will probably make someone else's life easier.
I am going to bid you adieu and good night.